Last week was a pretty busy week for me. As well as closing out business with a major international bank who are going to be using GigaSpaces to speed up their trading systems (and the results of this in itself are impressive, speeding up Trade queries from 30 minutes to between 15 to 30 seconds) we also had a major Telco go live with their first service hosted on Amazon EC2.
The client in this case chose to use GigaSpaces on EC2 because:
(i) Security: The Telco’s services were exposed over a secure SOA layer hosted in an internal Data Centre. This, coupled with a secure EC2 instance in which all public cloud /private cloud connections were done over SSL gave them the ability to consider hosting front end and new application services outside of the corporate data center
(ii)Flexibilty and Agility: The difference in building out the service in EC2 and doing this in-house was vast in terms of timescales. Difficulty in procuring machines for the reference environment and for Test and Development would have meant the service could not have been deployed in the timeframe that the business required.
(iii)Cost: Upfront costs were zero to minimal. Just the costs of renting EC2 units for reference, test and development
(iv) Little or no impact on the development process, other than speeding up ! The use of GigaSpaces Cloud tooling meant that the development team used their normal agile approach and used the GigaSpaces cloud tools to automate deployment to the cloud.
(v) Testing Scale: The ability to procure instances immediately to test scale meant that the robustness of the service to handle load could be validated early.
(vi) Choice: As GigaSpaces can be used inside the corporate data centre or on the cloud (unlike some vendors I could mention) then the organisation could make the choice as to the most effective way to make the deployment based on cost and speed.
If you would like to have a look at the high level architecture of this application here.
Also, if you did not get a chance to view it, GigaSpaces held a webinar on “Deploying your existing applications to the Cloud”. I’ve embedded the video below so you can view this.
