questions - logs, stability, docs, policies

Hi,

A few questions:

1/ Where can I find catalina.out and other tomcat related log files on Tomcat machines?

2/ What are the policies of all the apps I upload to cloud foundry? Where are they kept, who has access to it? What is the security level of my AWS credentials storage?

3/ Any chance to get some kind of NDA?

4/ We're planning to deploy a production version of our app within a month, in a multi-machine environment. Is Cloud Foundry mature enough for prod use?

5/ SpringSource is known of its great docs. What is the reason CF is so poorly documented?

6/ Any significant companies using CF so far?

Thanks a lot for all your answers.
Regards,
Petr

Hi Petr,

Thank you for your interest in Cloud Foundry.

1. Tomcat is a standard installation, located in /var/lib/tomcat5. You can find catalina.out at /var/log/tomcat5/catalina.out. However, our default application server installation is SpringSource tc Server, an enterprise version of Apache Tomcat. Its log file is /var/log/tcserver-catalina.out.

2. The applications that you upload are stored in your S3 buckets by using the AWS credentials that you supplied. So all the AWS securities apply. We do store your AWS credentials encrypted in the Cloud Foundry database so that we can invoke AWS web APIs on your behalf.

3. Not sure what the context of your question is. Can you explain?

4. Cloud Foundry is geared towards development use at the moment, but we certainly have users who use it for production. Ultimately, we make use of the EC2 infrastructure, and as long as you are comfortable with the SLA that it provides, then there's no reason why you could not be deploying production applications through Cloud Foundry to EC2. Once the application is deployed, you have full access to the instances themselves, and you can choose to modify or monitor them with your own tools if you require more visibility or control over what Cloud Foundry provides.

5. We do apologize for the lack of documentation. At the moment we are focused on developing the service and have released it as beta to get feedback. We are in the process of acquiring resources so that we can have a GA in early 2010 with proper supporting documentation.

6. We cannot make public the names in our user database except for those that have given clearance to provide quotes and such for press releases. One of those companies is Digitas, a leading digital marketing firm, which has used Cloud Foundry for production applications on multiple occasions.

I am looking forward to hearing about your experience with Cloud Foundry. Thanks.

Charles

Hi Charles,

Thank you very much for your thorough and convincing answer.
Regarding NDA question - I thought you're storing war apps on CF machines.

CF seems to fit very well into our scenario. We'll keep testing and if all the available features work for us we'll surely give it a try.

Thanks again,
Petr