Thinking Out Cloud

Another nice post on Space-Based Architecture

There seems to be some nice momentum in the blogosphere around Space-Based Architecture and GigaSpaces.

I already mentioned this post. Now, on Dave's Java Blog, he writes this about Nati Shalom's presentation at Jazoon (I edited for spelling mistakes):

Lets get he most important bit out of the way first. I want to suggest we look at OpenSpaces:

http://www.gigaspaces.com/wiki/display/GS6/Open+Spaces+Frequently+Asked+Questions

You’ll see that it’s supported by GigaSpaces it was there CEO speaking [It was actually our CTO - Geva]

The lecture was about scalability in tiered systems and the need for replication in each layer and the effects on performance of two phase commits and the amount of network traffic that goes on in a workflow.

There suggestion is to do horizontal scaling with a single virtual machine handling all the layers and then having multiple JVMs. Now doesn’t that sound familiar. The one thing they did suggest was to use Spring as a mechanism for instantiating new JVMs as necessary to manage load with an ‘SLA’ manager to manage the overall system.

The speaker was asked about data volumes, he was talking abut many terabytes of memory but allocating subsets to different JVMs, deja-vu….

So if you haven't already -- download our 6.0 RC1!

GigaSpaces Customer Conference: Blow-by-Blow

Nati wrote an excellent post with a "blow by blow" of the GigaSpaces European Customer Conference we organized in London a couple of weeks ago.

This is an interesting read because Nati gives brief descriptions of the many success stories of using GigaSpaces that our customers and partners presented there. Also gives you a sense of how widely applicable Space-Based Architecture is.

We're planning a similar event for the U.S. on October 9, 2007 in New York. More on this to come.

Space-Based Architecture - A Succinct Description

I like how Fabrizio Gianneschi describes Space-Based Architecture on his Championing Java blog (based on his impression from Nati Shalom's presentation at Jazoon):

Third talk was about Space-based architecture, a solution made by GigaSpaces to solve big scalability and availability requirements. A very good presentation given by a very good speaker. To summarize, classic tiered architectures spawned across servers and layers simply... sucks. Google has proven that when facing huge scalability requirements it's a lot better to have fast and replicable solutions. Just like a "plug & play" architecture, made by an all-in-memory stack and JVM, where you can easily horizontally add more units in order to get the requirements. Very interesting.

How Start-Ups Succeed

Last week, Massimo Pezzini at Gartner published a new report on GigaSpaces. Here are some of the highlights I liked. First, his high level overview of what GigaSpaces is (with my comments in brackets):

[GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform] supports the open-source Spring framework, is OSGi-enabled for optimized deployment of applications and uses JavaSpaces infrastructure for fast in-memory message passing and data storage. XAP also supports dynamic and transparent application component deployment and relocation across a grid of Linux or Windows [also Solaris, Unix - Geva] servers to meet demanding performance, scalability and availability requirements. XAP can participate in service-oriented architecture scenarios and also provides a basic [not really "basic", quite advanced - Geva] event-based programming environment and support for computationally intensive, batch-oriented analytical applications.

And here's the part I really liked:

GigaSpaces XAP is in line with industry trends, is based on a proven technology foundation deployed in a large number of business-critical scenarios and includes several widely recognized de facto standards. All these factors make it reasonably [reasonably? :-)] appealing to mainstream organizations.

Massimo also takes the opportunity to discuss the emergence of a new product category he calls Extreme Transaction Processing Platforms, or XTPP:

[GigaSpaces] XAP is one of the first of a new generation of platform middleware — extreme transaction processing platforms (XTPPs) — emerging from the convergence of grid architectures, event processing technology and distributed caching that will incorporate enterprise service buses and flow management technology. XTPPs will initially be aimed at supporting the most demanding transactional and analytical applications in the financial services, telecom, travel, Web commerce and defense industries. In the longer term, they will challenge Java EE and .NET-based enterprise application servers for mainstream applications.

The report also suggests that one of the threats GigaSpaces will be facing is the entry of big vendors (the usual middleware suspects) into the space. Let me tell you: This is not something we are losing sleep over.

First of all, we have been working on implementing this vision for several years, with a fairly sizable group of extremely talented people. Anybody else, big or small, has a lot of catching up to do. What the big vendors have right now is mostly marketing fluff that will just help us. And this is the sort of engineering problem that you can't just throw bodies at.

Second, The big guys have a fundamental problem in classic Innovator's Dilemma fashion. They are so heavily invested in doing things the old way (big boxes, heavyweight middleware tiers), they cannot afford (or so they think) to do things the right way (a lot of little boxes, lightweight middleware). It flies in the face of everything they have been saying for decades.

Oracle is never going to ask its customers the question, or hear it from them without asking: "Is a database and an application server fundamentally the right solution to this problem?" They are not looking for the disruptive approach, but incremental improvement. That's why they are only going to use Tangosol as caching, a "patch" if you will, for their slow, un-scalable database.

And that's how start-ups succeed, son.

Web Services: Barrier to SOA Adoption

Joe McKendrick just posted Time to Drive a Wedge Between SOA and Web Services? over at ZDNet. Good post except that I would remove the question mark from the title.

One would hope that we were way beyond this issue by now and that most people realize that SOA and Web Services are not one and the same, and that in many cases it make much more sense *not* to use Web Services. For example, when your environment is fairly homogeneous -- let's say, all Java -- why would you want to introduce something as foreign, slow and un-scalable as Web Services?

Even in environments where you do want to expose some of your services to external service consumers, it still makes sense to separate into "internal SOA" (not WS-based) and "external SOA" (exposing WS) -- as Joe himself sort of points out.

There is one point in Joe's blog that I would partially argue with:

Ultimately, SOAs will either be built entirely on Web services, on some Web services, or not on Web services at all. But, at least for now, for most enterprises, Web services represents the path of least resistance.

It is true that for *some* organizations, Web Services represents the path of least resistance. But just like in the classic Innovator's Dilemma -- you're not hearing what those who aren't your current customers are saying. In other words, those who would never consider SOA in the first place *because* of Web Services. Or more accurately, their perception that SOA equals Web Services. These are customers with high-performance and high scalability requirements. Customers with data-intensive and stateful services.

Try suggesting to a Wall Street trader to use Web Services for an automated trading application. You'll be kicked out in a New York minute. And that is despite the fact that these applications are highly amenable to be  composed of multiple loosely-coupled services, some of which can be reused by other applications.

They need something else.

Guy Nirpaz of GigaSpaces gives a good presentation at Javapolis on what that solution could look like.

GigaSpaces 6.0 - Download Now

As I wrote on the GigaSpaces Blog, GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform,  Version 6.0 RC1 is now publicly available for download. Please let us know what you think.

There is some very cool and innovative stuff in this version, maybe most notably is our new POJO-based OpenSpaces API, which supports the Spring Framework. In general, the whole idea of Space-Based Architecture is an out-of-the-box experience for developers in 6.0. I'll be writing more about this shortly.

Rod Johnson dedicated a nice portion of his keynote speech yesterday at SpringOne to discuss GigaSpaces, and two speakers from GigaSpaces gave their presentations at the show: Nati Shalom (Scalable as Google, Simple as Spring) and Shay Banon (the Spring Spacecraft).

 

The presentations will be publicly available shortly.

In the meantime, you can take a look at some of the links that discuss GigaSpaces and Spring:

Nati Shalom  - GigaSpaces: What does it mean to support Spring?
Adrian Colyer - Interface21: Spring - the De Facto Standard in Enterprise Java Programming
Shay Banon - GigaSpaces: Spring One  - Keynote

Peter Pilgrim - SpringOne 2007, Day One

SIFMA & the GigaSpaces-Microsoft Joint Solution

Microsoft and us announced today our joint solution of GigaSpaces integration with Excel and Compute Cluster Server.

I've written before about the problem this joint solution solves in Grid Meets the Middle Office.

Here's an excerpt:

    The solution addresses two fundamental challenges grid users in capital markets are facing today. First, it allows organizations to move large volumes of data to compute nodes with low-latency performance, and, second, it eliminates the disconnect between the front office and the data grid. In addition, GigaSpaces' platform provides a highly scalable application architecture that enables organizations to keep pace with rapid growth.

    "In the financial services industry, large and fast-growing applications based on Microsoft technologies need to process high volumes of transaction data very fast," said Stevan Vidich, U.S. capital markets industry technology strategist at Microsoft Corp. "Our work with GigaSpaces supports those requirements by offering end users a way to process high volumes of low-latency data using Excel-based applications. Smooth interoperability between Java and .Net is an added bonus."

Congrats to my business development team at GigaSpaces, and specifically Amnon Raviv and Dekel Tankel, for making this happen.

Come check it the solution at our SIFMA booth (#1419) this week:

    GigaSpaces and Microsoft will preview the combined solution, providing live product demonstrations,  June 19-21 in New York City at SIFMA's Technology Management Conference. Additionally, a white paper published by the two companies will be available on Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) Web site in late June.

Hope to see you there.

Scalable SOA

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to Dave Linthicum from the Linthicum Group ("SOA for the real world"). Dave is a prolific columnist, blogger and podcaster on SOA, and is one smart cookie.

What triggered my conversation with Dave were two of his most recent posts on his InfoWorld blog: Scalable SOA Solutions Continue to Emerge and Why SOA Governance Needs to do a Better Job with Data, both of which hit the nail on the head. In the first, Dave is saying something we've been saying at GigaSpaces for a while now, but he puts it really well:

Making solutions scale is nothing new. However, the SOA technology and approaches recently employed are largely untested with higher application and information and service management traffic loads. SOA implementers were happy to get their solutions up-and-running, however in many cases scalability is simply not a consideration within the SOA, nor was load testing, or other performance fundamentals. We are seeing the results of this neglect now that SOA problem domains are exceeding the capacity of their architectures and the technology in many instances.

As I previously wrote in The Law of Unintended Consequences scalability is even a bigger problem when it comes to SOA, because you have even less information how much and when your service will be consumed.

And as I wrote in SOA Governance - Who Cares? the large vendors are focused on selling their SOA governance products and relying on either Web Services or their same old J2EE app servers for the service implementation itself.

In his data post, Dave continues to nail it, bringing up the issue of not dealing with data and the service logic holistically in most SOA environments. Dave is obviously a guy who is out there in the real world.

At GigaSpaces, we are already seeing the need for a new approach to implementing services, especially with our capital markets customers and their very high-throughput, low-latency stateful front office trading and real-time analytics apps. And that is what Space-Based Architecture and our eXtreme Application Platform are all about.

We have recently posted a great example and explanation on implementing high-performance, scalable SOA using SBA and in the context of our new API - the OpenSpaces framework on our award-winning Wiki. Check it out. (BTW, It's still a work in progress).

Update: Check out this presentation from Guy Nirpaz at JavaPolis on Space-Based Architecture and Scalable SOA.

Update 1: Nati Shalom writes about this topic here.

Announcing GigaSpaces Version 6.0

On Tuesday we held our customer conference in London. The event was a great success.  We had a great line-up of speakers from our customers and partners, and of course, from GigaSpaces as well. We'll be making the videos of some of the presentations, as well as the slides, available on the web soon, so stay tuned.

At the event we also announced our latest product release, which has a new brand name: GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform, Version 6.0, or XAP for short (pronounced Zap). We will also have an Enterprise Data Grid edition for XAP.

Release Candidate 1 is currently available to people who signed up for our Early Access Program (go ahead and sign up here), and as Guy Nirpaz (GigaSpaces EVP R&D) writes we will make it publicly available on Tuesday, June 19 (opening day of SpringOne in Antwerp). GA is planned for September.

We bounced around a lot of possible names and we arrived at XAP because we felt it is the one that reflects most accurately what are product provides: a general-purpose and complete infrastructure software (middleware) for applications with extreme requirements in terms of performance and scalability -- a class of applications that is rapidly growing across industries.

For some more background on this, check out Nati Shalom's interview with Jonathan Erickson at Dr. Dobbs' in which he describes the reason there is a growing need for high-performance (high-throughput, low-latency, real-time) and scalability across many industries (he specifically gives examples from capital markets, telco, government and supply chains/manufacturing).

Some additional information and discussion on this TheServerSide post from Joseph Ottinger.

See Owen Taylor Live in NJ

I've praised Owen Taylor on my blog. If you want to see for yourself why Owen gets such rave reviews, you can check him out at the New Jersey Microsoft Developer's Group this week. If you're in the area, this is a worthwhile session.

The meeting is at:
194 Wood Avenue South (Prudential Building), Sixth Floor
Iselin, NJ 08830

Here's the abstract of his talk:

Space-Based Architecture and the End of Tier-Based Computing  - Owen Taylor, GigaSpaces

Most business applications are architected using a tier-based approach (presentation, business logic, data tier). The emergence of powerful and new commodity HW and the introduction of SOA/Grid architectures touts the promise of achieving true linearly-scalable systems at a lower cost.

However, as we shall see in this presentation, these new platforms and architectures are not aligned with the existing tier-based approach, which is by definition centralized and static. During the presentation, a new approach will be introduced - Space Based Architecture (SBA). It is basically a combination of Distributed Caching, SOA and Grid concepts combined into a single coherent architecture optimized for high-performance data-intensive applications, which transforms existing tier-based applications into linearly and dynamically scalable services. Towards the end we will also discuss a real-life example of a financial application that was built using the SBA. We will explore the patterns used to achieve this goal and explore how it can be applied to other applications with similar requirements.