Monthly Archives: July 2008

I’m on my way back from CloudCamp London. The event was very impressive and I had lot of fun (not only because of the beer and the pizza…)To be honest, I did not imagine that there will be over 250 people in the room, I guess cloud is one of the hott… Continue reading →

GigaSpaces had a good presence at CloudCamp in the UK this week. Dekel, from GigaSpaces in San Francisco and responsible for our Amazon EC2 and general cloud proposition with vendors such as Flexiscale and Cohesive FT, gave a good presentation as to the benefits that GigaSpaces provide in the cloud, which include automatic failover, automatic scale-out as well as providing quicker access to data which can then be asynchronously persisted to things like Amazon S3.

Excelian’s Adam Vile did a great job showing how technologies such as DataSynapse and GigaSpaces can be run on the Cloud. Excelian ran a Mote Carlo Simulation on the cloud using GigaSpaces Amazon EC2 image.

Of the other presentations Simon Wardley’s *aas presentation was the best – informative, watchable and listenable – great job !

Topics that the audience were interested in were Cloud Security, Portability between clouds, Location of data (for legislation and privacy purposes), a true Filesystem for S3 – amongs other things.

All in all it was a blast and the number of people at the event (200+) which was organised in such a short spate of time shows how popular the Cloud is right now.

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I think without doubt SimpleDB is interesting, and the new EC2’s Persistent local Storage is too. However I think for most web applications EC2 storage isn’t performant enough in and of itself and SimpleDB is, unlike the name purports, not a database as Nati Shalom outlines here.

Latency from web servers to DB’s can be an application killer, and with any application liable to spike, some form of Load balancing has to be required. There is one problem there however, there is no load balancing API. Yes, Elastic IPs is a great addition, **but** their is no Load Balancer API. You have to do it manually using EC2 instances. This in itself is not that easy and if there is a spike or a need to hugely scale quickly, well, you can guess the outcome.

Enter GigaSpaces EC2 hosted service. As Data is kept in memory (and highly available) it is lightening fast and using Persistency as a Service data not needed can be stored for durability. The combination of GigaSpaces and EC2 really is a fantastic addition to some of the shortcoming that perhaps stop companies looking at the cloud to host their services. I’d urge you to take another look.

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I’ve set up a channel on YouTube and will be updating it with GigaSpaces video collateral – you can access it at http://www.youtube.com/gigaspaces

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