grails serve index.html from CDN

Question

I would like my grails app to be deployed in the root of my domain:

www.example.com

instead of

www.example.com/myapp

However www.example.com/index.html is going to be static (static html, images, etc). I'm concerned about performance of having the the application server serve up the homepage. Can I configure my grails app / the cdn to serve index.html and it's content, and have the application server handle the dynamic pages?

I am using grails 2.2.4 I will be using Amazon S3 + ElasticBeanstalk + CloudFront.

Or should I be worried about performance at all? I am new to grails but it's my understanding that static content should be served by the webserver (Apache). Since there is no apache, I'm looking for another option to keep the load off of the webserver. The CDN seems like a good idea.

Answer 1

You certainly can do that. My personal recommendation would be to keep your images on S3 and use Cloud Front on top of that. Unless your static HTML itself is excessively large, it would be my recommendation to let Grails be Grails and take advantage of using Grails Resources for your JS and CSS as typical Grails projects do - even if your index page won't be doing anything dynamic right now. The more you break off the Grails conventions, the more complex things like builds and continuous integration can become. Look at using caching, minifying plugins and performance is very good.

As for deploying to the root "/" context, you can either do this by "prod war ROOT.war" for your Tomcat (or wherever) deployment OR you can build it as "whateverapp.war" and handle the routing rules with Apache mod_jk for more complex situations.

I've done probably a dozen Grails projects and use a very similar architecture now.

Answer 2

The simplest thing to do is to serve your entire domain from CloudFront and then serve the home page from your Grails app. You can configure CloudFront to cache requests to the home page so you will minimize the number of requests to Grails. You can map CloudFront directly to the ELB running in your Elastic Beanstalk environment.

The default Elastic Beanstalk configuration doesn't give you any way of serving static files from Apache; all the requests to Elastic Beanstalk are proxied to Tomcat. You can use advanced configuration to set this up though (using the .ebextensions mechanism).

You can also set up the Cache plugin to set up full page caching on the server side (I recommend using the Cache EhCache plugin as well). Combining server-side caching with CDN caching will get you a long way.

BTW, another good option for serving static content is to use S3 itself to serve pages. If you aren't doing anything too complicated it will save you the work of setting up and running a web server, although with Elastic Beanstalk there's not much to do.