Remote code execution in Java made trivial

SSH offers a very convenient way to execute shell scripts remotely. Code like

ssh myserver.acme.com << EOC
cd $APP_HOME
./start_my_stuff.sh
EOC

are fairly easy to write and read.

But while remote execution itself is easy, writing actual distributed code is total mess.

I’m a Java guy. I wish, I could run Java code remotely as easy as I can do it with shell.
And now, finally, I can.

@Test public void remote_hello_world() throws InterruptedException { ViManager cloud = CloudFactory.createSimpleSshCloud(); cloud.node("myserver.acme.com"); cloud.node("**").exec(new Callable<Void>() { @Override public Void call() throws Exception { String localHost = InetAddress.getLocalHost().toString(); System.out.println("Hi! I'm running on " + localHost); return null; } }); // Console output is transfered asynchronously, // so it is better to wait few seconds for it to arrive Thread.sleep(1000); }

And that snippet will work for you too, only two requirements are:

You should be able to SSH to target host without password (you have SSH key-pairs set up).

Remote host should have JDK installed, and java command on PATH.

That is it, there is no need to install anything special to target servers.

You can find more details in tutorial at GridKit site.

How it work?

A lot of black magic is happening behind the scene. In particular:

Classpath of current Java processes is replicated and cached at remote host using SFTP.

SSH is used to start remote Java process.

All communications between master and slave are tunneled in stdIn and stdOut (thus you can care less about NAT and firewall).

Modified version of RMI/serialization is used to allow anonymous classes to be run remotely.

By despite all that internal complexity, it just works. I’m using it to run agents on Linux and Solaris. I was using that stuff on Amazon EC2 and I cloud have master process running on my Windows desktop while slave scattered across Unixes.
It was long road. A lot of issues such as firewalls, bugs in JSch (java SSH client), subtle SSH limitation, etc has been solved along that path.
But now, I believe, it will “just work” for you too.

Java vs shell

But what is the need for such library in a first place? Below are just few of my reasons:

I’m a Java guy, I do not want to invest much in shell scripting skills.

Java is "really" cross platform, heck I can even debug stuff on Windows then run them on Linux.

I have to do a lot to distributed orchestration (starting/stopping processes in right order etc), it is so much easier to do in java.

It is hard to write reusable shell scripts, but easy for java (heck, I can even unit test pieces of deployment logic).

Remotting is just a remotting

Ability to effortlessly run remote java code is not much by itself. But it enables you to reach new levels of day-to-day automation (which was prohibitively expensive before).

But that would be topic for another post.