Like a Virgin…
Posted 20 December 2006 @ 1:24 pm by Nati ShalomIt's been 6 years already that I've been preaching on Space Based Architecture, and its potential scalability and reliability.
We're now getting closer to the end of the sixth year and there is nothing better that I could have dreamed of than seeing Virgin Mobile's recent PR as a new year present. Not just for myself but for everyone in GigaSpaces and throughout the world who believes in the technology and the concepts that we've been pushing for such a long time. There is nothing like the following testimonial to prove what we've been saying for a long time:
"The decision to move away from a traditional application server approach to the far more elegant and maintainable Spaces model was an easy one," Browne explained, "but what really appealed to us about the GigaSpaces product was its potential scalability and fault tolerance."
The new GigaSpaces-based OMS at Virgin Mobile proved itself under fire in November, 2006, when some key back office systems were unavailable for a time. While the OMS continued running, many orders were stalled in the state of being ready for processing by the back office systems. When it was restarted, every pending order was processed.
Pay attention for the following statement:
"The decision to move away from a traditional application server approach to the far more elegant and maintainable Spaces model was an easy one"
You're going to see more of that in the coming year … stay tuned 
.
Julian, thanks for the wonderful testimonial - I know of many organizations that think the same way but didn't have your courage or weren't able (due to company policy) to be public about it as you were.
As Madona used to say in her song, even though we're already six years in this business, "it really feels like the very first time."
BTW the full story can be found at http://www.gigaspaces.com/ne_pr06.html.
Nati
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December 29th, 2006 at 6:35 am
Thanks for the kind words Nati.
I think it’s more courageous these days to go with anything that might be termed the ‘traditional’ approach, be that app server or anything else, without giving serious thought to how business behaviour and technology implementation will align over time.
Business sponsors are much more savvy about what their competition has now, and frequently use words like accountability when referring to in-house IT services. It’s a brave career architect indeed who would go with one solution without having objectively considered all options - including ones that may at first seem quite radical. I absolutely don’t mean to knock app servers per se (in fact they will be the perfect answer to many needs), just that in the new Agile world, your building blocks become more important than ever if you want to free your developers to flex with the whims of the business, and roll with the punches created by the scalability demands we all hope will follow.
My best advice to anyone at the early stages of project delivery is to model just enough to get a deep feel for where the business is going - and to do this well you must forget everything you might think about what the solution looks like, and assume that most of what your stakeholders say they want is either wrong or will change. In fact I like to verbalise three times as many made-up requirements to test the behavioural aspects of the model (this also serves to excite the business owners into thinking more strategically too, although be careful that nothing sounds like a delivery promise with a date attached..).
When the same old patterns start to emerge you can look for the best framework within which to code, and you will have the added benefit that your customer will have half an understanding of why you are doing what you do.