Scalability Developer Competition Launched by GigaSpaces - $25k in prizes
Monday, December 10, 2007 at 4:59AM Today GigaSpaceslaunched the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge, which will award $25,000 in prizes to developers who build the most unique and innovative applications or plug-ins for the OpenSpaces Framework. OpenSpaces is an open source development solution from GigaSpaces for building linearly scalable software applications. It is widely used in a variety of industries, such as Wall Street trading applications, telecommunications platforms and online gaming.
The Challenge is designed to encourage innovation around OpenSpaces and support the developer community. Prizes ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 will be awarded to those who submit the most promising applications that were built using OpenSpaces, or plug-ins, and other components that extend OpenSpaces in pioneering ways.
The OpenSpaces development framework is designed to simply and dynamically scale out a software application across many computers -- also referred to as "cloud computing." It is unique in that it addresses applications that have been traditionally difficult to distribute in this manner, including high-throughput applications that are stateful, transactional or data-intensive. OpenSpaces leverages GigaSpaces' eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) as the middleware implementation, and is based on the popular Spring Framework developed by SpringSource .
Submissions for the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge will be accepted between December 10, 2007 and April 2, 2008. All applications will be reviewed and judged by a panel of industry experts, and the winners will be announced on the OpenSpaces.org Web site on April 22, 2008. The awards -- including the $10,000 first prize -- will be presented to the winners at a gala in San Francisco during the JavaOne 2008 conference in May. Winners will also be recognized in a worldwide press announcement.
The OpenSpaces Developer Challenge marks the latest initiative by GigaSpaces to encourage development and innovation in the developer community. The Company provides developers with easy access to GigaSpaces' products and solutions through its Start-Up Program, which provides qualified companies and individuals with full, free and perpetual use of the Company's flagship product, GigaSpaces XAP. In addition, the Company provides a free Community Edition of its product and contributes to several open source initiatives, including the Spring Framework and the Mule ESB.
To encourage "early bird" applications for the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge, ten $1,000 prizes will be drawn among those applicants who submitted an application concept (not actual code, just the concept of the proposed submission) by January 29, 2008.
Interested developers should:
-
Go to the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge Web site
-
Read the Challenge guidelines and FAQs
-
Develop a killer application or plug-in based on OpenSpaces
-
OPTIONAL: Submit their application concept by January 29 to be eligible for the ten $1,000 "early bird" prizes
-
Submit their actual application (including code) by April 2, 2008
Additional information on the Challenge is available here .
1 Master, N Slaves
Monday, December 10, 2007 at 12:46AM Hello all, Reading the site you can note that "1 Master for writes, N Slaves for reads" scheme is used offen. How is this implemented? Who decides where writes and reads go? Something in application level or specific database proxies, like Slony-I? Thanks.
Synchronizing databases in different geographic locations
Friday, December 7, 2007 at 11:32AM Our company offers a web service that is provided to users from several different hosting centers across the globe. The content and functionality at each of the servers is almost exactly the same, and we could have based them all in a single location. However, we chose to distribute the servers geographically to offer our users the best performance, regardless where they might be. Up until now, the only content on the servers that has had to be synchronized is the server software itself. The features and functionality of our service are being updated regularly, so every week or two we push updates out to all the servers at basically the same time. We use a relatively manual approach to do the updating, but it works fine. Sometime soon, however, our synchronization needs are going to get a bit more complex. In particular, we'll soon start offering a feature at our site that will involve a database with content that will change on an almost second-by-second basis, based on user input and activity. For performance reasons, a complete instance of this database will have to be present locally at each of our server locations. At the same time, the content of the database will have to be synchronized across all server locations, so that users get the same database content, regardless of the server they choose to visit. We have not yet chosen the database that we'll use for this functionality, although we are leaning towards MySql. (We are also considering PostgreSQL.) So, my question for the assembled experts is: What approach is the best one for us to use to synchronize the database instances across our servers? Ideally, we'd like a solution that is resilient to a server location becoming unavailable, and we'd also prefer a solution that makes efficient use of bandwidth. (Processing power doesn't cost us a lot; bandwidth, on the other hand, can get expensive.) FWIW ... (1) Our servers run Apache and Tomcat on top of Centos. (2) I've found the following "how to" that suggests an approach involving MySQL that could address our needs: http://capttofu.livejournal.com/1752.html Thanks!
Easier Production Releases
Wednesday, December 5, 2007 at 3:10PM I’ve been a part of some late night release procedures and they’re never fun. You’ve got QA, Dev, IT and a handful of managers sitting in their jammies in a group IM (or worse, a conference call) from 2:00 AM until way too early in the morning. Everyone’s grumpy and sleepy, causing the release to be more difficult and take longer. Sometimes the dreaded “rollback!” is yelled. All this because you’re running a high profile website that needs to be accessible 24/7, and 2:00 AM - 5:00 AM downtime is better than daytime downtime. If you're a site that doesn't have 10s of thousands to drop on a real http load balancer, use this strategy to release software during business hours with no downtime using apache's mod_proxy_balancer....
Product: Tugela Cache
Wednesday, December 5, 2007 at 12:29AM Tugela Cache is a cache system like memecached, but instead of storing data just in RAM, it stores data in the file system using a b-tree. You trade latency in order to have a very large cache. It's useful for sites that have caching requirements that exceed their available memory. It uses the same wire protocol as memcached so it can be dropped in without a hassle. From the website: As large MediaWiki deployments may gain performance using Memcached, at some level cost of RAM to store all objects becomes too high. In order to balance resource usage and make more use of our Apache server disks, Tugela, the distributed cached on-disk hash database, has arrived. Tugela Cache is derived from Memcached. Much of the code remains the same, but notably, these changes: * Internal slab allocator replaced by BerkeleyDB B-Tree database. * Expiry policy management moved to external program tugela-expire * Much statistics code made obsolete. An interesting point brought up in the comments is using memcached with a larger cache size than physical RAM and then let the OS swap versus using a b-tree to access data on disk. Nginx seems to use the "let the OS swap" approach to good effect. It would be interesting to see which approach works better. For an idea of how an in-process cache and a disk based cache hierarchy can work together take a look at Kevin Burton's IDEA: Hierarchy of caches for high performance AND high capacity memcached. There's also an interesting variation called Memcachedb which is said to be "a better and simplified Tugela." It's more of a persistence mechanism than a cache. It enables transactions, replication, and there's no expiration.
Database-Clustering: a8cjdbc - update: version 1.3
Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 5:55PM The new version of a8cjdbc finished some limitations. Now Clobs and Blobs are supported, and some fixes using binary data. The version was also fully tested with Postgres and mySQL. Since Version 1.3 there is also a free trail version for download available. Check it out and test yourself... Take a look at: http://www.activ8.at/homepage/en/a8cjdbc.php I've downloaded the latest version and setup a environment with one virtual database and two database backends. I tried to make a "non real life szenario": The first backend was a Postgres node, the second was a mySQL node. Everything works fine - failover - recoverylog, etc... with to different backend database types. So check out the trial version and test yourself the clustered driver and give me some results about your experience with a8cjdbc. As I only tested mySQL and Postgres (and the non real life szenario with two different backend types) - maybe someone else have experiences with out databases? greetings Wolfgang
a8cjdbc - update verision 1.3
Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 5:45PM The new version of a8cjdbc finished some limitations. Now Clobs and Blobs are supported, and some fixes using binary data. The version was also fully tested with Postgres and mySQL. Since Version 1.3 there is also a free trail version for download available. Check it out and test yourself... Take a look at: http://www.activ8.at/homepage/en/a8cjdbc.php I've downloaded the latest version and setup a environment with one virtual database and two database backends. I tried to make a "non real life szenario": The first backend was a Postgres node, the second was a mySQL node. Everything works fine - failover - recoverylog, etc... with to different backend database types. So check out the trial version and test yourself the clustered driver and give me some results about your experience with a8cjdbc. As I only tested mySQL and Postgres (and the non real life szenario with two different backend types) - maybe someone else have experiences with out databases? greetings Wolfgang