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 :) ).

Join Us for the New XAP Security Framework Webinar

You’re welcome to join our XAP security webinar on Wednesday, October 28.

In this webinar I’ll will explain the motivation behind our revamped security framework and overview its capabilities. The session will also include a live demo in which I’ll show how to secure the GigaSpaces runtime environment in a few simple steps, and how to enable security for a typical application without changing a single line of code or configuration.

The webinar will be held at 9am PDT, 12pm EST, 5pm CET. Please click here to register

Hoping to see you tomorrow,
Uri

GigaSpaces XAP 7.0.1 Is Out!

I’m happy to announce that today we’ve released our latest version, XAP 7.0.1. I would like to share with you a few details about it. Version 7.0.1 is a service pack release on top of version 7.0.0 and as such is backwards compatible with it. In addition to a number of bug fixes on top of 7.0.0, It includes some very interesting features and improvements around 3 main areas: Enterprise grade security, improved usability and APIs and better troubleshooting and monitoring capabilities. In addition to that, we’ve also worked on further optimizing the performance of our data grid implementation. Here’s a short description of the release highlights:

• Security: 7.0.1 introduces a revamped security implementation for the best possible data grid security. This implementation was specifically designed to support enterprise and cloud data grid scenarios in which the data grid is accessed by multiple applications and serves as a central data repository. In terms of relevance to the cloud, it brings a new level of data security which enables you to safely store data in cloud environments without having to worry about security hazard related to storing your data off premises. In addition to transport level security for all data grid related communication (based on SSL), it includes support for users and roles, with a comprehensive permissions system to enforce authorization for every operation, starting from the management of the GigaSpaces infrastructure, processing units and space (data grid) instances and ending with content based authorization to access the data grid contents and operate on it. The new security implementation is fully supported by the various management interfaces (GUI, CLI and administration API) and also provides open APIs for integration with 3^rd party user registries. For more details please refer to this page. We will also dedicate a separate blog post to this important aspect of the XAP 7.0.1.
  
  
• API and Usability:
  • All new space based remoting implementation for XAP.NET. Space based remoting has been around since version 6.0 in XAP for Java and extends the Spring remoting stack to provide a wealth of benefits in comparison to traditional remoting implementations, such as: high availability of exposed services, transparent client side failover, location transparency, load balancing across services in the cluster, map/reduce support and asynchronous invocation (please refer to “The Service Virtualization Framework” white paper in our whitepapers section if you’d like to further learn about the benefits of space based remoting). As of version 7.0.1, it is also available for our XAP.NET users with all the goodies which are part of the Java implementation. The documentation of this feature can be found here.
  • XAP.NET built processing unit container. In order to further ease and simplify the processing unit development and deployment experience in XAP.NET, we've implemented the Basic Processing Unit Container, which is a smart built in implementation of the processing unit container interface. This container automatically starts and manages GigaSpaces related components for you (such as space instances, event containers and remote service endpoints), relieving you from the need to explicitly manage the life cycle of those components and allowing you to focus on your application’s business logic.
  • Easier cache eviction policy configuration. This is a nice little configuration improvement that makes our users’ life easier when configuring the cache eviction policy. In previous releases, the recommended way to control the eviction policy was by using space properties. In 7.0.1, this has been made much more elegant with native XML namespace and Java code configuration support. Here’s an example of how you would have configured LRU eviction in your pu.xml and in code in 7.0.0 and 7.0.1:
    
  • Extended Indexing at the property level: Extended indexing allows you to index properties of objects written to the space with a BTree index, thus allowing for range queries (based on the property type’s natural ordering). Prior to 7.0.1, extended indexing was only available at the class level, which means you had to either use the extended index for all the properties of a certain class or for none at all (and make do with basic indexing). In 7.0.1, we’ve enabled extended indexing at the property level, so you can now choose the right indexing scheme for each property. For example, the identifier property of a certain class would typically be indexed with a basic index, which does not have a sense of order between indexed values and is therefore more lightweight and faster than extended indexing. For another date/time or number property, you would use the extended indexing since if you would like to perform range queries (e.g. all the objects with date property before 1/1/2009). This can be configured via annotations, e.g. @SpaceProperty(index=IndexType.Extended) or via XML, e.g.
    <property name="lastName" index="EXTENDED"/>.
    
    
• Performance improvements for embedded operations. As with every release, we have dedicated quite a lot of time to further optimize areas which we knew could be improved. In this release we have focused on performance of embedded space operations and by optimizing the concurrency of internal thread and object pools we have been able to present improvements of up to 200% for embedded space operations. The following graphs show across-the-board improvements in comparison to 7.0.1 (these were measured with 8 threads concurrently accessing the space). It is important to mention that these improvements were achieved without any sacrifice to the consistency and correctness of the space operations:
  
  
  
• Better troubleshooting and monitoring:
  • More information in log files: We are continuing to improve the quality and amount of information exposed via our log files. 7.0.0 introduced some major logging improvements (per-pu log messages, improved file naming scheme, time-based rollover policies and more). In 7.0.1 we’ve added some more helpful information to help you tune and troubleshoot the system. The first one is GC awareness. You can define a GC pause upper threshold (10 seconds by default). In case the garbage collection process takes longer, the system will log this for future reference. In addition, we’ve added logging for the recovery process (which occurs when starting a backup space instance and recovering the data from the primary) so you can now tell exactly what happened during the process and how long it took
  • Replication statistics in administration API. This is an important addition to the administration API which enables you to monitor the rate at which objects are replicated and whether or not there’s an issue with the replication mechanism. For more details refer to the org.openspaces.admin.space.SpaceInstanceStatistics interface(specifically, the getReplicationStatistics() method).

As always, we would be happy to hear your feedback on the new release (you can send it directly to feedback7.0 at gigaspaces dot com). For the complete release content please consult to the official 7.0.x release notes (refer to the notes relevant for 7.0.1).