TV Made Right :)

We've just created a new channel on YouTube called GigaSpaces TV. It will feature interviews and tech talks on various aspects of the product, and you also get to see me unshaved in the first episode ;). In it I give a short overview of the new APIs we're coming our with in our 8.0 release.

Stay tuned by subscribing to the channel!

Enjoy,

Uri

To Scale or Not to Scale - the Recording

The recording of my session at Devoxx 2010 is now available online at parleys.com
At this point you need a subscription to view it in full (which I highly recommend anyway since there's a lot of valuable content there), but it will be made fully public over coarse of the next few months.

Enjoy,

Uri

Yes, Sql!

See below the slide deck from my session today at QCon SF titled "Yes, Sql!" (hopefully you liked it if you attended :) ). It focuses on how the classic querying models like plain SQL and JPA map to distributed data stores. It first reviews the current distributed data stores landscape, and its querying models (K/V, Column, Document), and discusses the wide range of APIs for data extraction from these data stores. It then discusses the main challenges of mapping various APIs to a distributed data model as we've done over the past few months in GigaSpaces, and the trade offs to be aware off.

Yes, Sql!

View more presentations or Upload your own.

The direct link is http://www.slideboom.com/presentations/232665/Yes,-Sql!

Our Citrix Integration Demo

This week we’re attending the Interop conference in New York to present our integrated solution with Citrix Netscaler and XenServer. The solution enables GigaSpaces XAP applications to utilize the Netscaler load balancer AND XenServer infrastructure to dynamically and automatically scale applications (e.g. a standard JEE web app) based on real time application load.

The following screen cast demonstrates how a standard JEE web application (in this case the Spring framework PetClinic demo application) is dynamically scaled on the Citrix SoftLayer cloud.

It runs on a number of virtual hosts which in turn run the Netscaler load balancer, the Web container and the MySql database.

The demo shows how the web application automatically scales out when the load increases. The scale out process includes the following stages:

1. The system identifies that the average load has crossed a certain threshold.
2. The system dynamically starts a new Xen virtual machine to host a new instance of the web application. This VM includes the GigaSpaces Agent component which enables XAP to dynamically start new JVM to host another web application instance.
3. A new web application instance is provisioned to the newly started JVM
4. The Netscaler load balancer configuration is automatically updated to reflect the new web container and route traffic to it
5. The average load goes back to normal since the traffic is not evenly balanced across the old and new web container.

The demo also shows how the system automatically recovers from a forced virtual machine failure by re-instantiating the virtual machine and the GigaSpaces components on it, and then re-provisioning the missing web application instance onto it.

Enjoy,
Uri

XAP 7.1 Released!

We've just released XAP version 7.1 today, and are very excited about what it has to offer!

You can find a good description of the release contents in Joe Ottinger's post from yesterday.

I've also done a short interview for DZone, describing the motivation behind it and the overall vision we have for XAP (you're most welcome to vote for it :) ).