The Stax service now includes upgrades that improve production application security and reliability by allowing you to run dedicated servers on your own EC2 account. Stax servers running on your EC2 account are used only by your applications, so they are isolated from applications deployed by other Stax users and can take full advantage of the underlying computing resources.

Dedicated EC2 servers are still 100% managed by the Stax service and work with our streamlined deployment and configuration tools. This means that deploying and managing your Java applications on EC2 is now as just simple as using the public Stax Cloud, but with complete control over your computing capacity and how your applications are grouped together.

Pricing for Stax dedicated servers starts at $0.14/hr and is billed directly to your existing Amazon account as paid AMIs.  Here’s a quick overview of new premium upgrades and their benefits…

Dedicated Java Servers

Increase application capacity, reliability and security by running your Java applications on your own EC2 Java servers. Applications are published as standard WAR files, and run in standard JVMs, so you can use any Java libraries and frameworks.

Features include:

• More memory and computing cycles – Your apps are free to consume all available compute cycles and are no longer limited to 256MB of RAM
• No restrictions – Apps running on dedicated servers are not subjected to the resource utilization and cluster size restrictions placed on applications running on the public Stax cloud.
• Monitoring and alerting – Apps are monitored 24×7 and are proactively fixed if application failures are detected.
• Shared server pools – Improve server utilization and cost efficiency by running multiple Java applications on your EC2 servers. This is perfect for lightweight apps or for apps under development.
• Mirrored server pools – Ideal for production applications. Provides precise control over the applications deployed on each server in the cluster. Easily add/remove clustered servers to increase application scalability and reliability.

Learn more…

Dedicated HTTP Router with SSL

Enhance your application security and reliability with a dedicated SSL-enabled reverse proxy.

Features include:

• Application routing – The router is automatically reconfigured to route to applications as deployments are added and removed from your backend application servers.
• Load balancing – Requests to application servers are load balanced and will fail-over to another application server if an application server is unavailable.
• Wildcard domains – Your router can be bound to a wildcard domain of your choosing instead of the default staxapps.net domain.
• SSL – Provides a securely encrypted channel between your clients and your server

Learn more…

Dedicated SQL Database Servers

Upgrade your production databases to use dedicated servers that let you leverage the full performance and capacity of the underlying EC2 computing resources.

Features include:

• High performance servers – Improve performance by upgrading to bigger EC2 servers with more memory
• Monitoring and Alerting – Databases are monitored 24×7 and will send alerts if a problem occurs that can’t be automatically fixed.
• Clustering – Master/Slave configurations are available with support for load-balanced reads on slaves
• Backups – Databases are backed up daily to Amazon S3.

Learn more…

Advanced Monitoring and Profiling with New Relic RPM

We have partnered with the team at New Relic to provide a powerful hosted performance monitoring solution for your production Java applications deployed on Stax using RPM.

RPM also provides production profiling for applications so you can find performance bottlenecks at the code level, uncover flaws in the application stack, reduce CPU utilization, and improve transaction response time.

RPM Lite is available for free, and Stax customers get a 25% discount on New Relic Bronze, Silver, and Gold level subscriptions.

Learn more…

We hope you’ll find these new features useful in your applications and your business and we look forward to hearing about what you’d like to see next.

Sincerely,

The Stax Networks Team

The Stax team has actually been using Scala for internal feature development for a few months now and we’ve really grown to love its lightweight syntax and deep functionality.

Since the Stax cloud provides a fully-functional Java runtime, developers can leverage all of the features provided by Scala, including Actors, which provide a powerful message-based construct for handling concurrency. The Stax database service also gives apps an easy way to leverage Lift’s rich persistence model.

Here’s a quick glance at what it now takes to get a simple Scala app started and deployed…

Create a new Scala project
mvn archetype:generate \
-DarchetypeCatalog=http://mvn.stax.net/archetypes.xml

Run and test the Scala project locally
mvn stax:run

Deploy the Scala project to the Stax cloud
mvn stax:deploy

# mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeCatalog=http://mvn.stax.net/archetypes.xml
Choose archetype:
1: http://mvn.stax.net/archetypes.xml -> stax-scala-archetype (Scala 2.8 with Stax Plugins)
Choose a number:  (1): 1
Define value for groupId: : example
Define value for artifactId: : myapp3
Define value for version:  1.0-SNAPSHOT: : 
Define value for package:  example: : 
# mvn stax:run
INFO: Starting Coyote HTTP/1.1 on http-8080
# mvn stax:deploy
Deploying application spike/myapp3
........................uploaded 25%
........................uploaded 50%
........................uploaded 75%
........................upload completed
INFO: upload complete, response=<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ApplicationDeployArchiveResponse>
  <id>spike/myapp3</id>
  <url>http://myapp3.spike.staxapps.net</url>
</ApplicationDeployArchiveResponse>

I hope you’ll try out Scala and Lift on Stax to feel the productivity boost you’ll gain when combining the next generation of language, framework and deployment environments for the Java runtime. See if you don’t love the end-to-end experience as much as we do.