Author Archive

Next Page »

R7.0 M8 - Feature Complete

May 9th, 2009

As we are reaching the last mile of GigaSpaces XAP R7.0 release schedule, I’d like to share with you our short term plans for the release. Last Monday, we released R7.0 M8. This is the last milestone before a first release candidate coming in two weeks.  M8 contains all the features that are going to be included in R7.0 (if we’re lucky, we may be able to squeeze in few more), but in general you can consider M8 as the ‘Feature Complete’ release.

The plan is to release by the end of June. We are planning to get R7.0-rc1 in two weeks, couple of weeks later R7.0-rc2,  and R7.0 GA will come out by the end of June.

As always, quality is our number one priority. When it comes to the holy triangle of content, quality and schedule - I’ll always favor quality. This is in fact one of the reasons we develop using scrum and for the early access program our product is being released by. As noted before, this methodology enables us to get feedback very early in the release cycle, and enables us to get this feedback into the product while it’s in the making.

I’d like to encourage all of GigaSpaces developers to take advantage of early access program, and check out M8. There are some very cool features, that I’m sure you’ll like. We’re interested in anything that you have to say about the release:

Yes, I know, the marketing team told me already, that I have to sell you the release in exchange for the feedback. There is a lot to say about R7.0 in a nutshell R7.0 M8 contains:

 

Comments are welcome at GigaSpaces XAP forum, or you can send it directly to feedback7.0 AT gigaspaces DOT com

Thanks for the cooperation

Guy

Scrum is Infectious

March 26th, 2009

Today, on my way back from Sweden, I stopped in the
Netherlands to visit Tricode, our strategic partner. On the way from the airport
we’ve chatted as always, and I realized that they started to implement scrum as
well in their projects. This is not the first (not the second and even not the
10th) GigaSpaces’ partner who’s adopting scrum, directly influenced by
GigaSapces. As our product development is being done with Scrum.

I wonder why is that, what makes them adopt scrum?

Well, it is optional that it has nothing to do with GigaSpaces.
Scrum is a popular agile methodology and coincidently we use scrum as other
organizations. This may very well be the case, but I doubt that.

When asking some deeper questions, it appears that the level
of service GigaSpaces’ partners and customers are getting because we are able
to respond quickly to on-going requirements and the fact that our early access
program allows our partners to influence a product release while it’s in the
making is perceived as a great advantage. This opens a whole new game of
collaboration between the software vendor (GigaSpaces in this case) and our partners
and customers. They are now part of the team. I believe this is the level of
cooperation and participation any product team would like to be able to provide
to its end users, and so do they. I think (humbly) that this is the main reason
for the aforementioned question.

Furthermore, it opens a whole new discussion channel between
us. We not only speak about the functionality provided by our product, we also
share experiences and advices on scrum implementation. This is the great part
of being a development team which creates a product that other development
teams use.

It is truly a great feeling. We’re adding value not just by
delivering our product per se. We also create a lot of value by incorporating
our customers and partners into our development process, and by sharing
experiences and helping each other out.

I may very well be wrong with my conclusion, but it does
feel good!

My SDC Presentation

March 24th, 2009

Here’s my SDC presentation. Please feel free to comment:

 

 

 

Building Scalable .NET Apps
View more presentations from Guy Nirpaz.

Scandinavian Developer Conference on March 24

March 21st, 2009

Greetings,

I’m going to be at the Scandinavian Developer Conference  (SDC) on Tuesday. The conference is held for the first time in Scandinavia with a lot of developer centric content: technologies and development methodologies, my two favorite subjects.

My presentation title for the conference is ‘Building Scalable Applications in .NET‘. It was six months ago when I proposed the presentation abstract to the organizers, when I first got invited, and a lot have changed since. It is clear that when talking about technology these days, one can not escape the business conditions of present days. For this reason I’m going to focus on the conflicting challenge: meeting scalability requirements and at the same time minimizing costs and up-front investment.

If you’re going to be at SDC, please feel free to stop by and introduce your self.

As I’m going to spend some time on planes, I’ll have some decent time
to catch up on blogging. There are some very exciting news from
GigaSpaces product development that I didn’t have a chance to blog
about yet, hopefully this week I’ll get to it.

See you at SDC!

GigaSpaces Product Release - R7.0 M4 Update

February 4th, 2009

It has been a while since I last blogged on our product development activities. I’ve been very busy in the past few weeks with helping customers move their systems into production. Today, once XAP R7.0 M4 is released it is a good time to shed some light on our R7.0 release train. So, what’s GigaSpaces team has been doing lately? Please read on some main activities we’ve been doing in our product XAP:

Id API
Was released already in M3, however it is worth being mentioned again. The motivation was to enable smoother transition for typical database centric applications and allow them to take advantage of GigaSpaces XAP. The Id API which was added to the GigaSpaces interface, enables accessing objects in the space based on their Id. This feature is extremely useful when converting exiting database centric DAO layers. In addition this feature enables creation of relationship based access layers into the space memory storage.
Admin Model and API
This one is one of my favorites. As I’m a real believer in Domain Driven Design (a must read book!), we’ve finally formalized GigaSpaces domain model through a new Admin API . The Admin API lets you traverse over GigaSpaces run-time model, get information and statistics and perform operations. The Admin API supports both query model and event model for building sophisticated user interfaces on top. For example, one can select specific GSC, learn about the processing units which are deployed on it and query various interesting configuration and run-time aspects, for example - the amount of memory that is being used vs one being configured. The possibilities are almost endless. The main motivation behind the new Admin Model and API is to enable automatic system’s management of large clusters. We’ve added few Groovy scripts which demonstrate the power behind the API, however, these are just tasters, and you are encouraged to play with it and build your own automation and monitoring tools.
We are taking advantage of this API to automate all of our internal system tests (application tests). Once we are complete our automation rate will be above 90%.
gs-agent
The agent is a new component usually at the machine level which is responsible for creation and life-cycle control of the other run-time components: grid containers (GSC), grid managers (GSM) and lookup services. As of R7.0 the easiest option to start GigaSpaces run-time components would be to make sure agent is running on every available machine and from a single location, remotely you’ll be able to start/restart/stop the entire cluster. The agent was added into the product also to enable better integration with cloud environments , where servers come and go more dynamically and most of the control is being done remotely.
Scalability
We’ve been working very hard to take advantage of the new ever improving multi-core architectures. GigaSpaces engine is currently locks free for read operations. In cases where multiple threads reads the same data, they will not hold even a read-lock. In previous versions we used an optimized read/write lock. However, in this version we came up with a new strategy which exploits dramatically better the new multi-core architecture and increase overall system’s scalability. In addition we’ve completely re-written the LRU (least recently used) eviction strategy by changing the internal data structures to more optimized and concurrent ones. One of the side effects of this enhancement is the ability to easily add additional eviction strategies for various usage patterns (time based as an example). We are also considering opening the API publicly once it is stabilized. You should expect significant performance and scalability improvement one multi-core hardware architectures.
Improved Local Cache
Local Cache is used to improve clients read performance by caching recent reads within the client’s VM. This pattern is also known as Mater-Local. In previous releases the internal mechanism used to sync between the local cache and the master space was based on commands. While being very effective, this approach required writers to be aware of usage of local caches in the system. Now we no longer use the command pattern and have removed this limitation. In addition the local cache is now more scalable as well as it gains from the scalability improvements described above.
Be advised also that the web session replication is based on local cache, hence benefits from the local-cache improvements. 
We will continue to work on some more improvements in the local cache for R7.0 which will become available in the coming R7.0 milestones.
Improved Class-Loading Model
When two processing units, lets say a consumer and a producer used the same data model and in our language, used the same entry set, we have required to put those is a jar under a specific processing unit directory named shared-lib. This is not required anymore. We have changed the way class-loading is being performed in grid containers (GSC). For backwards compatibility purposes still works, however it is not required anymore.
The main benefit from this change is that once a processing unit is undeployed from a grid container it does no leave behind anything at the container’s VM. In addition web applications who write and read from a space can keep the default web-app structure model. Simply put, any standard JEE web application can be deployed into GigaSpaces XAP cluster, take advantage of memory storage and dynamically scalability without structural modifications.
As you can see, we have accomplished quite a bit in the first four milestones of R7.0. The GA release is scheduled for mid year, with a milestone release every 2-3 weeks. Our team is committed to release only high-quality milestones, we have internal go-no-go meeting prior to each milestone release. So, don’t hesitate to download the milestone releases and try the new features and improvements. We will be very happy to get your feedback.

Next Page »