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December 22nd, 2008
As the festive season approaches and sales cycles close and we prepare for another year, that by all accounts is going to be a difficult year for the economy worldwide, my thoughts turn to the choices that companies have when they look to implement projects and technologies next year. To that end I thought I’d limit myself to 3 reasons why I think you should choose the GigaSpaces product over alternative competitive products (in no particular order - and it was hard sticking to 3 !):
Language interoperability: Although GigaSpaces is a Java based product it has full interoperability with .Net, C++, and scripting languages such as JavaScript, PHP, JRuby, Python etc. Not only that it also works with Map(JSR-107), SQL queries via JDBC and has Excel ‘Cloud’ integration. No other competitive technology has such breadth of interoperability, and GigaSpaces .Net and C++ technologies are now in their 3rd generation. See Shay Hassidim’s great blog entry to find out more about our C++ API and our .Net team’s overview of the latest .Net release. I’d also suggest having a look at Nati Shalom’s blog post discussing how to achieve risk analysis on the cloud using Excel. My own OpenSpaces project utilising GigaSpaces with PHP to build an iPhone web application is available with source code here.
Performance: Quite simply over this last year I have seen GigaSpaces out perform the competition in a variety of financial services, telecommunications, and manufacturing accounts. Forget simple ‘Get’ and ‘Put’s’, I’m talking about heavy load transactions scaling out linearly. GigaSpaces literally blew away the competition. For more on performance I’s suggest checking out the great blog posts by our performance expert, Shay Hassidim: You want it fast or super fast ?; Scaling the web layer - the web container benchmark;Memory Capacity Planning - the footprint benchmark;Write Latency benchmark. Of course GigaSpaces also broke record processing transactions with the Sun T5240 server.
Cloud Computing: GigaSpaces is the only of its competition have wholly embraced Cloud Computing. What does this mean ? This means that we have integrated it into our development environment, made it available on Public Clouds such as Amazon EC2, FlexiScale and GoGrid, and entered into value added partnerships with other cloud vendors where it makes sense, such as CohesiveFT and RightScale. I have personally seen the flexibility this gives small and large organisations not only from a pay-on-demand- utility compute viewpoint, but technically, in the ability to be able to do testing early on the cloud, and being able to use the cloud for ‘burst’ when internal resources are saturated, to companies hosting new applications on the cloud entirely. I notice from Googling that someone has posted a presentation from Nati Shalom on getting ready for the cloud on Slideshare so I am going to take advantage of this and embed it here so you can find out more about GigaSpaces and Cloud Computing.
As I said limiting to 3 was tough, I could have blogged about GigaSpaces unique ability to scale out Spring applications, or about how GS’s unique approach to middleware by condensing the tiers is the reason why the product is ultra scalable, or how you get so many more ‘ilities’ as part of the architecture that you would using alternatives, such as queueing and messaging….well you get the point 
It only remains for me to say, may you you make the right choices for your organisation next year, and may the holiday season bring you some peace before 2009 begins. Happy Holidays !
December 21st, 2008
There is a very good article on TechCrunch entitled “Fear Kills Businesses, Dead”. The essence of the article is that due to the fact that we are at the start of the recession many businesses are locking up - they don’t care about getting ahead they are just concerned about survival.
As Brian Solis, the author of the article, outlines, this may not only be the wrong approach but businesses could use the current economic situation to their advantage to become more focused, and I would argue, innovate in a way they would not otherwise be able to. As Brian states “this is the time to strategically cut dispensable expenses, but also invest in growth”
“There’s a distinct difference between mere survival and succeeding in real world business. Many companies may unwittingly lock themselves in an isolated panic room instead of taking strategic steps to evolve and grow the business opportunity that exists today.”
Fear inspires desperate actions. Hope (combined with clarity and inventiveness) galvanizes action and engenders opportunities.
Many of the article themes that Brian touches upon are covered by the whitepaper by Nati Shalom, CTO of GigaSpaces entitled “Survival Guide for IT During the Economic Meltdown”. I suggest you read the TechCrunch article and then register and download the article by Nati. They really do make for an illuminating read.
“Remember, the economy is a yo-yo on an escalator. It might go up and down, and down some more, but eventually, it’s always going up (once we fix it, this time).
It is during these most difficult times when character is truly tested and defined.”
November 27th, 2008
The recent CloudCamp event in London was well put together and it was interesting to view new propositions, new entrants (Microsoft) and in general seeing the cloud market gathering pace. As usual the best presentation of the night was Simon Wardley’s ! If you want a full detailed review check out Gojko Adzic’s blog entry here.
If you’ve followed my blog before you will have followed me talking about the EC2 offering by GigaSpaces which takes the GigaSpaces Scale out, low latency platform into the cloud (check out also the cloud tooling built into the 6.6 GigaSpaces release). Recently I have had more direct experience of moving existing GigaSpaces customers towards the cloud and bringing new GigaSpaces customers to the cloud. It’s interesting that the reasons for doing this are diverse and not the same, namely:
Pay-On-Demand - The ability to bring a business model to life using an Enterprise scale solution by being able to pay on demand. In many cases Enterprise Software has enterprise price tags so that smaller businesses and individuals have to look at potential OpenSource alternatives. Using GigaSpaces on the clouds bridges this gap and allows new business ideas models to come to life without the hundred’s of thousands of dollars price tag it can take to put together all the software license and hardware required to host such solutions.
Testing / Scale- For businesses who are unable to, or having organisational restriction to deploying in the public cloud, EC2 provides a fantastic way to be be able to test throughput and scale. It is incredibly difficult for organisations to be able to, for example, requisition a hundred or two hundred servers to test scale. Ideally you want to do this early in the application lifecycle but the reality is that for many projects this either occurs late or does not occur and a scaled up estimate is used.
Reduce Adminstration / Operational Issues - Many organisations outsource some part of their development for either a service or an application. At some point this needs to be implemented in the organisation and has to go through an ops sign off which invariably is complex and time consuming, as well as expensive. More organisations are looking at providing service interfaces that can be used as an entry point into their apps / services but in which the outsource app/service is hosted in the cloud. Not all apps and service fit this model but it’s clear to me that many organisations see the current economic crisis as an opportunity to test this model.
Provide burst capabilities - To handle spikes and bursts. The ability to bring on servers that exist in the cloud to help out when needed is now very much a reality and it helps save money by preventing over-provisioning and still having the operational capacity to handle these peaks.
It’s Cheaper ! - Simply put it can be cheaper deploying apps / services using GigaSpaces EC2 and the cloud than it is building and hosting in a datacentre. All organisations need to reduce costs, but not reduce quality or services, during the current economic crisis so this is proving an apt time to test this model.
If you are interested in the economics of cloud computing I would strongly suggest checking out “The survival guide to IT during the economic meltdown” whitepaper that is available in draft format here.
October 23rd, 2008
It’s that time again. Cloud Camp London is scheduled for November 13th. CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas, and if you were there last time you will know what to expect, if not come along and get acquainted. It’s a great event to see new technologies and get to grips with the paradigm shift that is occurring.
September 21st, 2008
An interesting article in Information week outlines the 20 cloud computing companies that you should look out for over the coming months. There are some of the established players like Amazon and Google, but also some of the newer companies, and this is a nice intro into the players in the space.
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