Archive for April, 2009
Live from AWS startup event in the UK
April 28th, 2009I’m currently at the Amazon Web Service Startup event in the UK. It’s been a good day and there have been a lot of good presentations. GigaSpaces had a cloud client, Orbyte, referenced in a prior post presenting their “Trading in the Clouds” solution. You can see the presentation that they presented below.
Eclipse Plugin for GigaSpaces
April 23rd, 2009One of my colleagues - Robin van Breukelen - is a graduation student at the Hogeschool Arnhem Nijmegen (www.han.nl). For his graduation project, he is currently working on the implementation of a plugin for Eclipse, that will allow you to manage the Gi…
Using GigaSpaces to Trade in the EC2 Cloud
April 22nd, 2009One of the GigaSpaces customers I have been working with recently is called Orbyte Solutions. The team behind Orbyte have many years experience developing FX Trading and Spread betting platforms for large banks and financial organisations. The Retail CFD, FX and SpreadBetting is a highly competitive market which operates on tight spreads and low commissions. Clients are sophisticated and expect product innovation, advanced trading features and above all being able to trade quickly in any conditions.
The key drivers for these businesses to remain competitive can be summarised as:
- Consistent, reliable and efficient service delivery under any market conditions
- Product innovation and time to market
- Cost effectiveness
Historically the platforms which support these businesses have been based on a tier architecture (at best 3-tier at worst 2-tier). They are often heavily reliant on relational databases. Sometimes they implement some level of data caching and messaging. Orbyte observed that most companies in this sector have developed these caching and messaging components internally. What might have given them a technical edge 10 years ago have now become a burden with a high cost of ownership. Using GigaSpaces Orbyte have built solutions that allow Retail CFD, FX and SpreadBetting businesses can get more “bang for their buck” by moving away from the traditional tier-based model and internally developed “plumbing” components (messaging, caching, and deployment).
As GigaSpaces makes it easy to build systems that work as easily on the Cloud as they do internally Orbyte have been able put a demo of their system on the Amazon EC2 Cloud.
In terms of EC2 instances - this is currently running on
- 1 x m1.small - GigaSpaces Grid Service Manager
- 1 x c1.xlarge - Instance - Grid Service Containers
- 1 x m1.small - Windows Small Instance - .NET Web Services
**Until 5PM GMT 23rd April the demo system will be live on the EC2 Cloud for you to have a sneak peak**.
You can use the connection details below.
test accounts:
password: 1515
username: test02
password: 1515
username: test03
password: 1515
Building a Global Cloud Solution for Mobile Sales Users with GigaSpaces
April 22nd, 2009One of the interesting things about working with any Middleware solution (and of course GigaSpaces is unique as the Middleware is virtualised) is the interesting projects that come up with and the way in which the technology is applied. One of the projects that is coming to fruition is one in which GigaSpaces is being used to develop a 52 country data hub for a mobile Sales solution.
Phones and handheld devices today are much more powerful than fully fledged computers were 10 years ago, but when interacting with data and services, similar challenges exist to traditional web applications, namely performance, latency and scale.
The users of the system’s in question are Sales Representatives in different Countries who use the handheld devices to place orders, schedule deliveries etc of Retail stock. The hand-held devices will also contain accounts, sales and other pertinent information from a back-end CRM system. The handhelds will operate disconnected from any central system but may connect at intervals during the day over GPRS or Wireless links. An initial data download at start-of-day will provide the information required for business conducted that day. During the day uploads of changes (deltas) might occur, and finally at end of day a full reconciliation and synchronization process will update both the Siebel database and handhelds.
The solution copes with data conflicts, where both Representative’s data and central CRM data have been modified, by applying specific business rules at a record or field level.
The solution also provides buffering/queueing mechanisms to manage the flows into and out of the CRM system in order to accommodate the volume/bandwidth restrictions imposed by the package, whilst still allowing thousands of representatives to initiate synchronization operations at the same time.
Information extraction from the CRM is implemented using the CRM’s data API and delivery to the CRM is mediated through the CRM Web Services interface.
A mobile solution from this particular CRM vendor already exists which the company in question actually already used, but it did not suit their needs as it was a relatively thick client and it was silo’d over multiple CRM implementations. It was also not loosely coupled.
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The new system had to provide isolation of the handheld software from the CRM. Why ? Because the solution needs to be abstracted from the actual Siebel schema implementation to allow for future change, which included the possible substitution of the CRM package with an alternative CRM solution. The solution also needed to allow scalability to many thousands of Sales Representatives without overloading the existing Siebel or back-end systems.
The high level architecture for this system is outlined below:
GigaSpaces uniquely provided:
- A Modular, task-based approach to services
- Flexible interfaces for upload and polling
- Pluggable business logic for synchronisation
- Standards-based Web Services provide handheld connectivity
- Ability for WAN level sychronisation
- In-Memory Cloud for low latency and fast performance
Given the current penchant for Cloud this type of solution could become much more pervasive for organisations in the future.
Performance, Performance, Performance
April 15th, 2009Speed as they say is relative. It is great tearing along the road in a 180 mph Ferrari, bit if you don’t care then you will be happy poodling along at 50 mph. In most of the industries or companies I work in however speed is of the essence. Fast is good, faster is better, faster than that is even better…
Some examples….one of the companies I sold to in late 2007 was a post trade reconciliation company that used GigaSpaces to build their next generation trade reconciliation system, replacing their existing C++ system. Why ? Because ever increasing trade volumes meant they had to have an infinitely scalable system for their clients and their existing system could not cope. They put GigaSpaces XAP through rigorous tests to prove that by doubling the amount of CPU’s each time they got near linear scalability. Needless to say GIgaSpaces passed that test and the new system is now being pushed out to their clients. Prior to using a GigaSpaces designed system it took 8 minutes to process 1 million Trades. It now takes 42 seconds….
In the first quarter this year we closed business with a Bank in which GigaSpaces is being used to interface with a trading system (a multi-asset class solution for treasury and capital market participants) to speed up reading of trade data. Simple Trade queries that were taking minutes are now delivered in seconds, and complex Trade queries that were taking 30 minutes or more are now being delivered in around 45 seconds……
In an earlier post I outlined a poll I had set up on LinkedIn that asked the question “What is you or your organisation’s single biggest concern about deploying applications to the Cloud ?”. I promised to post the results, which you can now see below:
Surprise, surprise, it is performance. It will come as no surprise to you that the performance gains that are experienced by GigaSpaces users in private Data Centers are also experienced in the Cloud. GigaSpaces for the EC2 cloud performs with minimum latency and maximum performance. Why ? The GigaSpaces solution is managing data in memory and ensuring it is co-located in the same cloud node as the relevant business logic making for lightening fast performance.
Performance….if you need it you know where to look……
