Designing applications for cloud deployment

During the last two years, I was involved in several projects deployed on the Amazon cloud. Being a relatively early adopter was a fantastic experience that provided lots of opportunities to burn my fingers and learn from mistakes. It also seriously challenged my view of scalable software architectures. I spoke about key lessons learned at CloudCamp London last week – here is the summary of that presentation.

http://gojko.net/2010/01/25/designing-applications-for-cloud-deployment/

Space Based Programming in .NET

Space-based architectures are an alternative to the traditional n-tier model for enterprise applications. Instead of a vertical tier partitioning, space based applications are partitioned horizontally into self-sufficient units. This leads to almost linear scalability of stateful, high-performance applications.

This is a recording of a talk I did last month where I introduce space based programming and demonstrate how that works in practice on the .NET platform using Oracle Coherence and GigaSpaces.

Improving performance and scalability with DDD

Distributed systems are not typically a place domain driven design is applied. Distributed processing projects often start with an overall architecture vision and the idea about a processing model which basically drives the whole thing, including object design if it exists at all. Elaborate object designs are thought of as something that just gets in the way of distribution and performance, so the idea of spending time to apply DDD principles gets rejected in favour of raw throughput and processing power. However, from my experience, some more advanced DDD concepts can significantly improve the performance, scalability and throughput of distributed systems when applied correctly.

This article a summary of the presentation titled "DDD in a distributed world" from the DDD Exchange 09 in London.

Data grid comparison: Oracle Coherence vs Gigaspaces XAP

A short summary of differences between Oracle Coherence and GigaSpaces XAP.

QCon London 2009: Upgrading Twitter without service disruptions

Evan Weaver from Twitter presented a talk on Twitter software upgrades, titled Improving running components as part of the Systems that never stop track at QCon London 2009 conference last Friday. The talk focused on several upgrades performed since last May, while Twitter was experiencing serious performance problems.

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QCon London 2009: Database projects to watch closely

Geir Magnusson from 10gen presented a talk titled Cloud Data Persistence or ‘We’re in a database reneaissance - pay attention” today at QCon London 2009. The main message of his talk was that “physical limitations of today’s technology combined with the computational complexity of conventional relational databases are driving databases into new exciting spaces”, or to put it simpler the database landscape is changing and we should keep our eyes on that.

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Coming soon: better JRockit+Coherence integration

At the Oracle Coherence Special Interest Group meeting today in London, Tomas Nilsson, the product manager for JRockit RT and JRockit Mission Control spoke about the future plans for JRockit and especially plans for improved Coherence JRockit integration.

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Messaging is not just for investment banks

It seems that HTTP calls have become a default way to think about distributed systems. HTTP and Web services definitely have a lot to offer, but they are not the only way to do things and there are definitely cases where web is not the right choice. Unfortunately, lots of people just stick with web services and hack on, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. In cases such as these, a different distribution paradigm can save us quite a lot of time and effort both in development and later in maintenance. One of those different paradigms is messaging.

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CloudCamp London 2: private clouds and standardisation

CloudCamp returned to London yesterday, organised with the help of Skills Matter at the Crypt on the Clarkenwell green. The main topics of this cloud/grid computing community meeting were service-level agreements, connecting private and public clouds and standardisation issues.

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Oracle opens Coherence Incubator

During the Coherence Special Interest Group meeting in London, Brian Oliver from Oracle yesterday announced the start of the Coherence Incubator project. Coherence Incubator is a new online repository of projects that provides reference implementation examples for commonly used design patterns and integration solutions based on Oracle Coherence.

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