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As others have pointed out, deploying EC2 instances automatically is fairly easy using the well-documented EC2 APIs.

The difficult part about distributed computing is synchronizing the work between available instances. For this, you might want to look at RabbitMQ or other queueing servers. One way to do this would be to have one thread (on your computer) generating problem instances, while you spawn spot instances on EC2 as desired, which consume the work and report the results. I suspect you could accomplish something similar using Hadoop/MapReduce.

How about the Ericcson AXD301 ATM switching system, with over a million lines of Erlang?

Or...how about RabbitMQ?

Or...how about Facebook's Chat backend?

There's quite a bit more than you think and the three I referred to were using Erlang- there's loads more with some of the other functional languages.

I'm bewildered why "plain old Java objects" is considered a virtue, considering it still makes the middleware language-specific for something that is essentially an integration software. If all you do is Java, fine. But gambling that you'll always be married to one language seems like you're giving up too much for no gain. Perhaps developers should take a closer look at something like Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and implementations like RabbitMQ or Apache ActiveMQ?

Goodness me...

I work on RabbitMQ which is a messaging implementation that provides AMQP and other patterns. I hope my comment here can clear up some misunderstandings in the community.

Here is an introduction to AMQP from the RabbitMQ team - there are two presentations and a video - made at Google a few weeks ago: http://google-ukdev.blogspot.com/2008/09/rabbitmq-tech-talk-at-google-london.html

People who are wondering why AMQP is important compared to MQ, JMS, or whatever, should check out the first presentation. The second presentation includes information about XMPP vs AMQP. The two protocols are strongly complementary and are not alternatives. You can use these today: RabbitMQ as someone mentioned above has clients in lots of languages like Java, Ruby, Python, .., and including .NET WCF and C#.

Integration with Visual Studio has been done: http://www.rabbitmq.com/dotnet.html

As someone else pointed out there are protocol adaptors including STOMP and XMPP: http://www.lshift.net/blog/2008/07/01/rabbitmq-xmpp-gateway-released

It is open source - we welcome questions on the mailing list which you can find linked to from the home page: http://www.rabbitmq.com/

Cheers,

alexis

Goodness me...

I work on RabbitMQ which is a messaging implementation that provides AMQP and other patterns. I hope my comment here can clear up some misunderstandings in the community.

Here is an introduction to AMQP from the RabbitMQ team - there are two presentations and a video - made at Google a few weeks ago: http://google-ukdev.blogspot.com/2008/09/rabbitmq-tech-talk-at-google-london.html

People who are wondering why AMQP is important compared to MQ, JMS, or whatever, should check out the first presentation. The second presentation includes information about XMPP vs AMQP. The two protocols are strongly complementary and are not alternatives. You can use these today: RabbitMQ as someone mentioned above has clients in lots of languages like Java, Ruby, Python, .., and including .NET WCF and C#.

Integration with Visual Studio has been done: http://www.rabbitmq.com/dotnet.html

As someone else pointed out there are protocol adaptors including STOMP and XMPP: http://www.lshift.net/blog/2008/07/01/rabbitmq-xmpp-gateway-released

It is open source - we welcome questions on the mailing list which you can find linked to from the home page: http://www.rabbitmq.com/

Cheers,

alexis

While XMPP and AMQP do have some similarities, they were developed to solve quite different problems.

XMPP is better for human-to-human or human-to-machine interaction. It is better for federated networks (user@jabber.someserver.com can communicate with user@jabber.someotherserver.com). It has authentication built in. It's more "Internet ready", with modules for BOSH and IRC.

AMQP is geared more towards traditional machine-to-machine message queuing. It offers more control over the type of message delivery ("exactly once", "pubsub", "at least once"). It's aiming to just be a message queue.

RabbitMQ is an open-source implementation of AMQP built in Erlang. They seem to be quite fond of XMPP, realizing the different natures of the protocols, and even created a module for ejabberd (also written in Erlang).

Another interesting mashup between RabbitMQ and ejabberd is is a project I stumbled across called Rabbiter, which looks like some sort of implementation of a Twitter-link setup. They're looking to bring CouchDB (also Erlang) in the mix for persistence.

I'm expecting to see quite a bit of interaction between RabbitMQ, ejabberd, and CouchDB over the next few months.

Ruby AMQP Client

Python AMQP Client

While XMPP and AMQP do have some similarities, they were developed to solve quite different problems.

XMPP is better for human-to-human or human-to-machine interaction. It is better for federated networks (user@jabber.someserver.com can communicate with user@jabber.someotherserver.com). It has authentication built in. It's more "Internet ready", with modules for BOSH and IRC.

AMQP is geared more towards traditional machine-to-machine message queuing. It offers more control over the type of message delivery ("exactly once", "pubsub", "at least once"). It's aiming to just be a message queue.

RabbitMQ is an open-source implementation of AMQP built in Erlang. They seem to be quite fond of XMPP, realizing the different natures of the protocols, and even created a module for ejabberd (also written in Erlang).

Another interesting mashup between RabbitMQ and ejabberd is is a project I stumbled across called Rabbiter, which looks like some sort of implementation of a Twitter-link setup. They're looking to bring CouchDB (also Erlang) in the mix for persistence.

I'm expecting to see quite a bit of interaction between RabbitMQ, ejabberd, and CouchDB over the next few months.

Ruby AMQP Client

Python AMQP Client

While XMPP and AMQP do have some similarities, they were developed to solve quite different problems.

XMPP is better for human-to-human or human-to-machine interaction. It is better for federated networks (user@jabber.someserver.com can communicate with user@jabber.someotherserver.com). It has authentication built in. It's more "Internet ready", with modules for BOSH and IRC.

AMQP is geared more towards traditional machine-to-machine message queuing. It offers more control over the type of message delivery ("exactly once", "pubsub", "at least once"). It's aiming to just be a message queue.

RabbitMQ is an open-source implementation of AMQP built in Erlang. They seem to be quite fond of XMPP, realizing the different natures of the protocols, and even created a module for ejabberd (also written in Erlang).

Another interesting mashup between RabbitMQ and ejabberd is is a project I stumbled across called Rabbiter, which looks like some sort of implementation of a Twitter-link setup. They're looking to bring CouchDB (also Erlang) in the mix for persistence.

I'm expecting to see quite a bit of interaction between RabbitMQ, ejabberd, and CouchDB over the next few months.

Ruby AMQP Client

Python AMQP Client