You're welcome to view my session from the annual Banking and Finance Technology Forum held last week in Hong Kong. The session is 20 minutes long, and deals with the challenges in developing and deploying applications on the cloud as opposed to your local IT environment.
I want to take the opportunity and thank our partners at Cluster Technologies for setting up a very nice booth and making all the arrangements for the conference.
As always, HK was action packed. Besides the conference, I had some very good meetings with various customers and prospects that focused on our upcoming 7.0 release and the GigaSpaces-Mule integration package which seems to be gaining quite a nice momentum these days.
Enjoy,
Uri
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Scalable SOA with Mule & GigaSpaces
If you missed the joint Webinar Ken Yagen of MuleSource and I did last week, you can find the recorded version here. The demo application shown during the webinar can be downloaded here.
The demo application requires the following to be installed on your machine: Please note that the Mule/GigaSpaces integration is also available in the latest GigaSpaces GA release (6.6.x), but XAP 6.6.x only supports the Mule 2.0 branch and not 2.1.
The documentation for the integration can be found here (6.6.3) and here (7.0 EA).
If you have any question please drop me a note here or use our online forums.
I would like to take the opportunity and thank Ken and the rest of the team at MuleSource for hosting this webinar and giving us the chance to present the joint solution to the community.
Uri
The demo application requires the following to be installed on your machine: Please note that the Mule/GigaSpaces integration is also available in the latest GigaSpaces GA release (6.6.x), but XAP 6.6.x only supports the Mule 2.0 branch and not 2.1.
The documentation for the integration can be found here (6.6.3) and here (7.0 EA).
If you have any question please drop me a note here or use our online forums.
I would like to take the opportunity and thank Ken and the rest of the team at MuleSource for hosting this webinar and giving us the chance to present the joint solution to the community.
Uri
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Scalable SOA - with Mule & GigaSpaces
You are welcome to join Ken Yagen, Sr. Director of Engineering at MuleSource, and myself for our joint webinar on scaling your SOA implementation with GigaSpaces and Mule. The webinar will take place on Wednesday, February 11th 2009, at 9am PT / noon ET / 6pm CET.
In this webinar we will introduce the Mule & GigaSpaces joint solution and discuss the underlying details around how this integration works. We will also discuss a real life use case and present a short demo that shows the benefits of this integration.
See you there!
Uri
In this webinar we will introduce the Mule & GigaSpaces joint solution and discuss the underlying details around how this integration works. We will also discuss a real life use case and present a short demo that shows the benefits of this integration.
See you there!
Uri
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
XAP 7.0 Is on the Move!
After the release of GigaSpaces XAP 6.6, we are now deep into the planning and development of our next major release, 7.0. This release, which is due in mid 2009, will include a few major themes, such as significantly better administration and monitoring capabilities, network resources optimizations, highly optimized and flexible local cache, reduced memory footprint, improved deployment model and support for deployment on the cloud.
Happy new year,
Uri
If you've been following us in the past few years, you know that our R&D is practicing SCRUM for quite a while now as part of the development process. Our head of R&D, Guy Nirpaz, has talked about it numerous times to both our users and the development community at large. The nature of SCRUM and the fact that it's composed of sprints enable us to share recently developed features with our community, as we've done in the past for versions 6.5 and 6.6.
Our sprints last two weeks, at the end of which we publish the results of the sprint as an early access milestone release. Our 7.0 early access program already includes the first two milestone releases, which you can download and play with. We will be happy to hear any feedback you have. The first two milestones include the following highlights:
- Significantly improved cache eviction policies (most notably a new LRU implementation) which improves LRU performance by a factor of 10 to 20 times (depending on the operation) for read operations without impacting write operation performance
- Support for time based window scenarios by maintaining the entry lease as part of the POJO instance. You can now annotate a field with the @SpaceLeaseExpiration annotation and the space will use it to store and retrieve the lease expiration time for the instance. This value can later be propagated to an external data source. Based on it, expired instances can be filtered out of the space when loaded from the database.
- The UI now enables you to the processing unit elements and the space cluster that belong to it in the same tab, so you have a coherent and intuitive view on your application components in one location. It also contains a summary view of all the space cluster details which enables you to quickly understand how your space cluster is functioning and what state it's in, as shown below:
- Ultra Fast Native local cache for XAP .Net - we have implemented our very own ConcurrentHashMap like data structure in .Net, which enables you to enjoy a performance of millions of ID based read operations per second
- SQL query optimizations: the space now processes SQL queries with OR staements in parallel, taking advantage of multi-core environments for reduced overall query times
- Improved CLI deployment support: your deployment command will now only return after all application instances have been provisioned, enabling you to create complex scripts to deploy multiple dependant processing units
Happy new year,
Uri
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Some Things that Kept Us Busy Lately
It's been a quite while since I last posted, but things have been more active than ever here at GigaSpaces. I'm writing this on the way back from Tokyo and HK, where I've had a few days packed with meetings with partners, prospects and customers (and of course good food and drinks…). It sometimes amazes me what people actually do and plan to do with our product, but I must admit that this time I was really blown away by some of the things I saw. Besides some very interesting meetings with number of financial institutions (many of which actually want to take advantage of the current crisis seeking to upgrade and improve their systems so that they'll be ready when things pick up), I also met companies from other sectors that are taking the product to uncharted territories, but in a good sense. Just to give you a taste of things (hopefully I will be able to discuss them in detail in a separate post), one of our customers implemented a system to share complex 3D models between designers and perform various types of simulations on it, doing real time sharing through GigaSpaces. Since they chose .Net as the implementation platform for this application, they used GigaSpaces XAP .Net to perform the model sharing, and when you see in your eyes how a complex and details 3D model is loaded from one client and gradually appears on a bunch of other machines, this is truly impressive.
It also made me proud to see that many of our new features are adopted and used widely. Which brings me to the main topic – what kept us busy lately.
First of all, we have released our 6.6 branch in September, which might well be the first version to truly offer an end-to-end application platform. Some of the things. Here's a glimpse of what it offers:
Besides the official 6.6 release (we've just released 6.6.2 - which I'll discuss in a separate post), we have also invested significant effort in integrating GigaSpaces with cloud and virtualization vendors. The integration package with Amazon EC2 enables you in a single click to provision EC2 instances, install GigaSpaces XAP on them, start GigaSpaces containers and deploy your application to them. Furthermore, it can also provision a MySql database that sits on top of Amazon EBS, and an apache load balancer incase you deployed a web application. Monitoring is done through our stadard user interface, which runs on the cloud and is displayed automatically as a local window on your pc. And the nice part of it is that it's all done via a web application, so no special installation is required to use it. We are currently at beta stages with this offering, and will soon make it publicly available. In fact, we already have quite a few customers that are using XAP on EC2 in production.
On another front, we have completely revamped our training offering (this is a good chance to thank Tricode, our Dutch partners, for taking this on and providing high quality results).The syllabus and details will soon be made available on our web site. The general idea was to create a modular training for various target audiences besides the usual core training (which was also completely rewritten). We offer both on site and public training. We will publish the next available schedule soon.
On the performance benchmarks front, Shay Hassidim, out deputy CTO, has been conducting numerous benchmarks in the last few months, which cover many aspects such as scalability, latency, web application performance and more. These benchmarks are posted from regularly in our company blog, and we have categorized them all for your convenience under one category. We will of course keep doing these benchmarks to provide more insights to our customers and prospects about how the product behaves in various scenarios.
That's it for this time - plane is about to land and they'll take my laptop if I don't close it :)
It also made me proud to see that many of our new features are adopted and used widely. Which brings me to the main topic – what kept us busy lately.
First of all, we have released our 6.6 branch in September, which might well be the first version to truly offer an end-to-end application platform. Some of the things. Here's a glimpse of what it offers:
- Standard JEE web application support (via the Jetty web container)
- An optimized, native .Net distribution (named XAP .Net), with full SBA capabilites
- A brand new task processing API (including peer classloading capabilities)
- Support for dynamic language invocation across the grid
- Further enhancements of our remoting capabilities
- Maven integration
- Improved annotation support for configuring messaging and remoting components
- Asyncronous operations
- Out of the box integration with the Mule ESB
- Seamless interoperability between Java, .Net and C++
- UI improvements
- Optimizations, optimizations, optimizations…
- Revamped documentation web site
Besides the official 6.6 release (we've just released 6.6.2 - which I'll discuss in a separate post), we have also invested significant effort in integrating GigaSpaces with cloud and virtualization vendors. The integration package with Amazon EC2 enables you in a single click to provision EC2 instances, install GigaSpaces XAP on them, start GigaSpaces containers and deploy your application to them. Furthermore, it can also provision a MySql database that sits on top of Amazon EBS, and an apache load balancer incase you deployed a web application. Monitoring is done through our stadard user interface, which runs on the cloud and is displayed automatically as a local window on your pc. And the nice part of it is that it's all done via a web application, so no special installation is required to use it. We are currently at beta stages with this offering, and will soon make it publicly available. In fact, we already have quite a few customers that are using XAP on EC2 in production.
On another front, we have completely revamped our training offering (this is a good chance to thank Tricode, our Dutch partners, for taking this on and providing high quality results).The syllabus and details will soon be made available on our web site. The general idea was to create a modular training for various target audiences besides the usual core training (which was also completely rewritten). We offer both on site and public training. We will publish the next available schedule soon.
On the performance benchmarks front, Shay Hassidim, out deputy CTO, has been conducting numerous benchmarks in the last few months, which cover many aspects such as scalability, latency, web application performance and more. These benchmarks are posted from regularly in our company blog, and we have categorized them all for your convenience under one category. We will of course keep doing these benchmarks to provide more insights to our customers and prospects about how the product behaves in various scenarios.
That's it for this time - plane is about to land and they'll take my laptop if I don't close it :)
Sunday, July 20, 2008
The Space as a Messaging Backbone - Why You Should Care
One of the main themes of GigaSpaces 6.5 XAP release (which is also true for our direction as a company in general), is the fact that we consider ourselves as a very complete application platform, and not just an IMDG solution. This has been evident in prior versions of the product, by with 6.5 we believe we got even closer to that goal, and that in many cases we can replace altogether a JEE application server.
We are taking this quite seriously, and actually invested a lot in making sure that this vision is also realized. A major part of this effort is a project we took upon ourselves to test and document the migration process from a typical JEE application to full Space Based Architecture. To keep the comparison as unbiased as possible, we delegated the actual coding and testing work to a team of professionals at Grid Dynamics (which BTW did a great job).
They first implemented a typical OLTP application using JEE (JMS, EJB, Hibernate, Spring) deployed it on a leading app server and tested the application in terms of latency, throughput, CPU utilization, etc. Next, they migrated the application in a few steps to full SBA.
Each step was documented and tested to assess its affect on the system and validate the benefits it gives. The steps were as follows:
When replacing it with the Space, we saw a major increase in throughput, as seen in steps 3 and 4 in the graph above. Another important fact which is not evident from the graph, is that GigaSpaces is much more scalable since the Space can be partitioned across multiple JVMs, and message load is shared between partitions (unlike most MOMs, which end up writing to the disk and typically use the active-standby topology).
Who Else Should Care
Besides ordinary JEE applications, this information is also very relevant to ESB-based applications. When implementing such applications, most people overlook the above, and use messaging servers or even worse, relational databases to handle the transport for their ESB based applications. For example, 65.3 % of Mule users use JDBC for transport, 48.4% use JMS, 30% use MQ Series for tarnsport (accroding to the 2007 Mule user survey).
So you see the benefit in using GigaSpaces as a transport layer instead of the traditional solutions.
With GigaSpaces 6.5, we have built in the integration with Mule into the product, so you can enjoy the GigaSpaces scalable transport (and other integration points) out of the box.
In addition, there are a number of other ESB integrations available.
You can find a very complete integration package with Apache ServiceMix in our community web site, OpenSpaces.org. Also, here's a nice integration project of JavaSpaces and Apache Camel which also enables you to use GigaSpaces as a transport layer with Camel.
Going back to the migration project I mentioned above, we plan to publish the application itself and the results we came up with in the process so people can check it our for themselves and understand how we did things. So stay tuned, there's a lot more interesting stuff to follow.
We are taking this quite seriously, and actually invested a lot in making sure that this vision is also realized. A major part of this effort is a project we took upon ourselves to test and document the migration process from a typical JEE application to full Space Based Architecture. To keep the comparison as unbiased as possible, we delegated the actual coding and testing work to a team of professionals at Grid Dynamics (which BTW did a great job).
They first implemented a typical OLTP application using JEE (JMS, EJB, Hibernate, Spring) deployed it on a leading app server and tested the application in terms of latency, throughput, CPU utilization, etc. Next, they migrated the application in a few steps to full SBA.
Each step was documented and tested to assess its affect on the system and validate the benefits it gives. The steps were as follows:
- Add 2nd level cache to Hiberante, which didn't require any code change.
- Change the data acccess layer to use the space instead of the database, with data base write behind (or Persistency as a Service) in the background
- Change the messaging layer to use the Space instead of the app server's JMS implementation
- Implement full SBA by collocating business logic, data and messaging in the same JVM by utilizing GigaSpaces processing units
When replacing it with the Space, we saw a major increase in throughput, as seen in steps 3 and 4 in the graph above. Another important fact which is not evident from the graph, is that GigaSpaces is much more scalable since the Space can be partitioned across multiple JVMs, and message load is shared between partitions (unlike most MOMs, which end up writing to the disk and typically use the active-standby topology).
Who Else Should Care
Besides ordinary JEE applications, this information is also very relevant to ESB-based applications. When implementing such applications, most people overlook the above, and use messaging servers or even worse, relational databases to handle the transport for their ESB based applications. For example, 65.3 % of Mule users use JDBC for transport, 48.4% use JMS, 30% use MQ Series for tarnsport (accroding to the 2007 Mule user survey).
So you see the benefit in using GigaSpaces as a transport layer instead of the traditional solutions.
With GigaSpaces 6.5, we have built in the integration with Mule into the product, so you can enjoy the GigaSpaces scalable transport (and other integration points) out of the box.
In addition, there are a number of other ESB integrations available.
You can find a very complete integration package with Apache ServiceMix in our community web site, OpenSpaces.org. Also, here's a nice integration project of JavaSpaces and Apache Camel which also enables you to use GigaSpaces as a transport layer with Camel.
Going back to the migration project I mentioned above, we plan to publish the application itself and the results we came up with in the process so people can check it our for themselves and understand how we did things. So stay tuned, there's a lot more interesting stuff to follow.
My TechTalk at TSS.com
You're all welcome to watch my talk at TSSJS Prague about the challenges in scaling web 2.0 applications. It's now online at TSS.com
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
