A different way of looking at running Tomcat is to ignore the cloud platform and install and configure everything inside a docker instance. Rather than picking a cloud instance we are going to run this inside VirtualBox and assume that all of the cloud vendors will allow you to run Docker or configure a Docker instance on a random operating system. What we did was to initially install and configure Oracle Enterprise Linux 7.0 from a iso into VirtualBox. We then installed Docker with the command and start the service
sudo yum install docker sudo systemctl start docker
We can search for a Tomcat installation and pull it down to run. We find a Tomcat 7.0 version from the search and pull down the configuration
docker search tomcat docker pull consol/tomcat-7.0
We can run the new image that we pulled down with the commands
docker run consol/tomcat-7.0 docker ps
The docker ps command allows us to look at the container id that is needed to find the ip address of the instance that is running in docker. In our example we see the container id is 1e381042bdd2. To pull the ip address we execute
docker inspect -f format='{{.NetworkSettings.IPAddress}}' 1e381042bdd2
This returns the ip address of 172.17.0.2 so we can open this ip address and port 8080 to see the Tomcat installation.
In summary, this was not much different than going through Bitnami. If you have access to docker containers in a cloud service then this might be an alternative. All three vendors not only support docker instances but all three have announced or have docker services available through IaaS. Time wise it did take a little longer because we had to download an operating system as well as Java and Tomcat. The key benefit is that we can create a master instance and create our own docker image to launch. We can script docker to restart if things fail and do more advanced options if we run out of resources. Overall, this might be worth researching as an alternative to provisioning and running services.