Clouds are taking over; not only for running your application, but you can also easily get Continuous Integration running in the cloud. Check out CI in a Box, which is a cloud based solution that provides Hudson, as a CI server, Java 6, Ant and Maven 2.

This blog article shows how. With an amazon AWS account running CI in a Box pointing to a codebase located in the Google code SVN repositor you can build an artifact whenever there is a change.

Cool stuff!

Interesting article in the Cloud Computing Journal about the scaling possibilities that Terracotta offers to Java. They can hook directly into Java memory at the platform level. Therefore, it offers a very scalable solution and makes it very suitable to run in a Cloud environment. Geert Bevin (Evangelist at Terracotta) explains it as follows:

"Terracotta's primary value is simple scalability. We deliver this using a high-performance distributed durable caching technology we call Network Attached Memory (NAM): NAM hooks right into the memory of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and allows users to share critical in-memory data between servers within the application tier, thereby avoiding unnecessary use of the database as a coordination point or a high availability mechanism. Databases as central "traffic cops" could become a scalability issue in many applications, especially those deployed in cloud infrastructures. We work with a lot of Java frameworks, including Spring and Hibernate, in a plug-in fashion, but you can also use Terracotta to scale and cluster Plain Old Java Object (POJO) applications as well, since we can hook directly into Java memory at the platform level."

Terracotta is open source and you can download a free version of Terracotta for development. Extra services, such as phone support, SLAs and training are also available.

Very interesting article from Lajos Pap about using pay-as-you-go Amazon Webservices to motor your web application and shows how to scale when necessary. Amazon lately introduced three great services:

• Elastic Load Balancing: automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
• Auto Scaling: automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. 
• CloudWatch: is a web service that provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources. Auto Scaling is enabled by CloudWatch.

Although the scenario is rather simplified in certain ways, it is a nice switch from the traditional hardware load balancing solutions and shows how to use Amazon's virtual environment in a very detailed way.