Dekel Tankel sent me a link to a recorded demo of the GigaSpaces CloudTools that he and Owen Taylor prepared. The demo shows a stock ticker application updated in real-time running on Amazon EC2 (using dummy data). In the demo, Owen shows how the application can auto-scale based on increased load and how it can heal itself in case any of the Amazon instances fail.
First, Owen shows how the application can be deplyed on EC2 with essentially a single click.
The application then starts running with 3 web containers and 4 processing service containers (2 partitions - or "shards" - each with a synchronous backup). As Owen simulates more concurrent users, the system reaches a pre-set SLA threshold on CPU utilization and automagically launches two additional instances on EC2. All of this happens with the application continuously running so that the end user is unaware of this happening in the background. Owen then kills ones of the partitions and shows how the backup becomes the new primary and another backup is launched to take its place. Again, in a way that is unnoticeable by the user.
Owen also demonstrates how you can move services to different EC2 instances by literally dragging and dropping them in the GigaSpaces UI.
Very impressive stuff and a very rich UI to give you an exact picture of what's going on.
Watch the demo here. (it's only a few minutes long)
Here's a screenshot of the GigaSpaces Manager UI (click image to enlarge):
