Archive for the 'SOA' Category
What a year!
January 5th, 2008For the past few days I’ve been trying to write a 2007 summary, but I found this task to be extremely difficult because so many things happened this year on so many fronts. I thought that it would probably be…
XAP 6.0.2 - lessons learned
November 18th, 2007
Last Monday we released XAP 6.0.2. This is the second service pack release on top of XAP 6.0, which we released in August. The adoption rate of XAP is exceeding all of our expectations, making us work very hard to address many requirements coming from so many users of our platform.
As always, full release notes are available here. I’d like to shed some light on some of the improvements introduced in 6.0.2.
The first one is called internally "max-instances-per-machine". This new improvement to OpenSpaces’ deployment-supported SLA is something that has been requested for a while. With this new SLA definition one can guarantee that primary and backup of the same partition will never run on the same physical machine.
These days, with the computation power available on every new box, our users deploy several instances of the Grid Service Container into the same physical machine. Until now, unless statically defined, this could have resulted in cases where both the primary copy and the backup copy of the same data may reside on the same physical machine. If that machine fails, data may be lost. Previous to 6.0.2 the solution was to statically define the phyiscal binding between the data partition and the host. Now with this new SLA definition it is much simpler. The system guarantees that this policy is met.
Another feature worth mentioning is support for batch notifications of Local Cache updates. In 6.0 we introduced a new event API, the EventSession API. This API consolidated all previous API options into a single consistent model. On top of that, we’ve introduced QoS optimizations into the messaging controlled by the application developer. One of them is to batch-up event notifications from servers to clients. Batching is controlled either by the size of the batch (number of messages per batch) or by the time between batch delivery. This option reduces load both from the server and the clients. The next logical step, which was started in 6.0.2, is to make sure the product uses this new API for all components that use events.
In the master-local pattern, the Local Cache relies heavily on events, and it was only logical to start with it. Now, Local Cache uses the batching optimization by default. This, of course, can be controlled via configuration. From our tests, we are seeing major scalability improvements when using Local Cache.
Many other enhancements have been introduced as well as many performance improvements. I’ll let my colleagues from the GigaSpaces R&D team Guy Korland, Shay Banon and others comment on those on their individual blogs.
One last comment on process. By now it is clear that the effort put into implementing Scrum and applying agile methodologies in our team is paying off. This is the third product release in the past four months, with tons of content and improved quality on every release. This remark deserves a post of it’s own, and I plan to write something soon. I am also going to share some of this information in my presentation at the coming JavaPolis event, so you’re all invited.
JavaPolis 2006 Presentation is online
June 6th, 2007Finally our JavaPolis 06 presentation is online. I promised a link 6 months ago, so here it is: http://www.bejug.org/confluenceBeJUG/display/PARLEYS/SBA+-+Scalable+SOA
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas - and online:)
May 6th, 2007For those who couldn't attend TheServerSide JavaSymposium event in Vegas a few weeks ago, you can find the presentation I gave together with GigaSpaces Senior Architect Shay Banon here: From Tiers to Services without Web-Services: Scalable and Stateful Services for Non-Intrusive SOA. It gives a sneak preview of our upcoming OpenSpaces project ,which [...]
When you need more than just a Data Grid
March 24th, 2007Last week I had the pleasure of spending half a day with the senior architects of one of the leading infrastructure software vendors. They are looking into embedding our product as a caching solution (aka Data Grid) for their next generation product lines. When we went through the list of requirements with the different [...]
