WAR Hotel Part 1 – Introduction

Background

What’s a WAR Hotel? It’s a big server (VM or bare metal) that can host a whole bunch of WARs. If you don’t know anything about WARs, here’s some prerequisite reading:

• Wikipedia article on WARs
• An introduction to Apache Tomcat (the most common server software that hosts WARs)
• Overview of Pivotal tc Server (the wrapper around Tomcat that makes a hotel possible)

WARs have been around a long time and were typically hosted on a server administered by someone who configured the server directly for the WAR(s) running on the server. It was easy when it was just one running instance of Tomcat on one server. The administrator was easily able to keep the server up and running, maintaining intimate knowledge of the server and what was required to host the WAR(s) on the server.

Well, things grew. First it was hosting 10s of WARs on a few servers, then 100s of WARs on scores of servers, now the demand is 1000s of WARs. No way we can keep up with this by hand. Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions like Pivotal Cloud Foundry or Redhat OpenShift make claims to solve this, but they are walled gardens that lock you in, they have a lot of features you may not need, and have yet to really strategically settle as viable alternatives (come on, admit it, they are still bets).

So if you would like to handle the scale problem with a transitional architecture until PaaS settles, you can use a WAR Hotel. And why is this approach on this blog? Because it’s a great way to learn about infrastructure coding and Chef! Let’s build a WAR hotel using Chef and a couple of other tools that don’t require big bucks and lots of people to maintain.

Enter Infrastructure Coding

Tools like Chef allow us to solve for this problem of scale. They were in fact created just for this purpose. They allow us to fully manage a server without hands, in code, and build a WAR Hotel that is automatically driven from data (I’m big on driving with data and designing this upfront).

Don’t worry about going off to Chef.io to learn, let’s learn with a real example here and slowly, deliberately build out the WAR hotel. It’ll be rudimentary at first (remember this is designed to do things like homeschool my kids), but when we’re done, we’ll be doing some complex stuff on a single node in Test Kitchen, which is a skill that could ultimately have you earning over $100K per year.

Move on to part 2.