Distributed Ant: A System to Support Application Deployment in the Grid

Abstract

e-Science has much to benefit from the emerging field of grid computing. However, construction of e-Science grids is a complex and inefficient undertaking. In particular, deployment of user applications can present a major challenge due to the scale and heterogeneity of the grid. In spite of this, deployment is not supported by current grid computing middleware or configuration management systems, which focus on a super-user approach to application management. Hence, individual users with limited resource control deploy applications manually which is not a grid scalable solution. This paper presents our motivation, design and implementation of a grid scalable, user-oriented, secure application deployment system, Distributed Ant (DistAnt). DistAnt extends the Ant build file environment to provide a flexible procedural deployment description and implements a set of deployment services.

ROST: Remote and hot service deployment with trustworthiness in CROWN Grid

“…To ensure security, they make use of the sandbox, which can restrict the service functions. DistAnt [23] extends the Apache Ant built file environment to provide a flexible procedural deployment description, and provides a solution to remote and hot service deployment based on Globus Toolkit 3. It does not provide any security mechanism for remote deployment.…”

JaDiMa: Java Applications Distributed Management on Grid Platforms

“…DistAnt [9] and GridAnt [10] specifically address the problem of helping users deploy their applications on the grid resources. They extend Ant with grid specific tasks, which users can employ to define their application's deployment workflow (e.g., compiling; authentication; resource location; code and data packaging, transport and unpackaging/installation, etc.).…”

Deployment of Infrastructure and Services in the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)

“…Other approaches and tools for Grid deployment include GITS [29], distributed Ant [30], the IBM autonomic deployment framework [31], deployment planning [32], PACMAN [33], GPT [34], and Virtual Machines [35]. None of these deal adequately with the deployment of services.…”