The interactive cloud

How many times have you been called in the middle of the night by your operation guys telling you that your application throws some odd red alerts? How many times did you found out that when those issues happens you don't have enough information to analyze this incident? have you tried to increase the log level just to find out that your problem became even worse - now your application throws tons of information in a continues basis most of which is complete garbage...

The current separation between the way we implement our application and the way we manage it leads to many of this ridicules situations. Cloud makes those things even worse.

In this post i suggest an alternative approach. Why don't we run our application the way we run our business? I refer to this approach as the "interactive cloud" where our application behaves just like our project team and the operations just like our managers. As with our business our application would need to take more responsibility to the way it runs and take corrective actions such as balancing it own resources, re-assign tasks to the available resources in case of failure etc. It will need to involve its manager only when it runs out of resource. It will need to provide reports in a way that makes sense to our managers.

In the first part of this post describes the general concept behind this model and the second part provides technical background which include code snippet based on our experience in GigaSpaces.

No to SQL? Anti-database movement gains steam – My Take

In this post i wrote my view on the anti SQL database movement and where the alternative approach fits in:

- SQL databases are not going away anytime soon.
- The current "one size fit it all" databases thinking was and is wrong.
- There is definitely a place for a more a more specialized data management solutions alongside traditional SQL databases.

In addition to the options that was mentioned on the original article i pointed out the the in-memory alternative approach and how that fits into the puzzle. I used a real life scenario: scalable Social network based eCommerce site where i outlined how in-memory approach was the only option they could scale and meet their application performance and response time requirements.

Google App Engine plus Amazon AWS: Best of both worlds

Google App Engine (GAE) is focused on making development easy, but limits your options. Amazon Web Services is focused on making development flexible, but complicates the development process. Real enterprise applications require both of these paradigms to achieve success… What we really want is the flexibility of AWS and the simplicity of GAE.

For the rest of the post see http://natishalom.typepad.com/nati_shaloms_blog/2009/06/google-app-engine-plus-amazon-aws-best-of-both-worlds.html

GigaSpaces Launches a New Version of its Cloud Computing Framework

This post include detailed on who is using the platform and how from Enterprise applicaitons, to ISV that are looking for SaaS enablement, through partners and solution providers that are looking for to gain a competitive advantage and deploy application in short time to market and small initial investment.

Designing a Scalable Twitter

There were many talks recently about twitter scalability and their specific choice of language such as Scala to address their existing Ruby based scalability. In this post i tried to provide a more methodical approach for handling twitter scalability challenges that is centered around the right choice of architecture patterns rather then the language itself. The architecture pattern are given in a generic fashion that is not specific to twitter itself and can serve anyone who is looking to build a scalable real time web application in the near future.

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Challanges for Developing Enterprise Application on the Cloud

This post I provided a summary of recent discussions outlining the main challenges that developers face today when deploying their existing JEE application to the cloud such as complexity, database integration, security, standard JEE support etc. In this post i also provided summary of how we managed to handle those challenges with our new Cloud Computing Framework by pointing to an existing production reference of a leading Telco provider.

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Its time for auto scaling – avoid peak load provisioning for web applications

Many web applications, including eBanking, Trading, eCommerce and Online Gaming, face large, fluctuating loads. In this post will describe how to achieve Right Sizing using virtualization and cloud computing. Will use a standard JEE web application to demonstrate how auto-scaling works on AWS Cloud without changing your application code.

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Getting ready for the cloud

This presentation illustrates how one can scale EXISTING JEE application and deploy it on Amazon cloud using GigaSpaces as the scale-out application server while: * Not having to re-write your application * Preventing lock-in to specific cloud provider * Enabling seamless portability between your local environment to cloud environment o No code or configuration change is required between the two environments o Develop local - test on the cloud o Built for iterative development

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Gigaspaces curbs latency outliers with Java Real Time

Today, most banks have migrated their internal software development from C/C++ to the Java language because of well-known advantages in development productivity (Java Platform), robustness & reliability (Garbage Collector) and platform independence (Java Bytecode). They may even have gotten better throughput performance through the use of standard architectures and application servers (Java Enterprise Edition). Among the few banking applications that have not been able to benefit yet from the Java revolution, you find the latency-critical applications connected to the trading floor. Why? Because of the unpredictable pauses introduced by the garbage collector which result in significant jitter (variance of execution time). In this post Frederic Pariente Engineering Manager at Sun Microsystems posted a summary of a case study on how the use of Sun Real Time JVM and GigaSpaces was used in the context of of a customer proof-of-concept this summer to ensure guaranteed latency per message under 10 msec, with no code modification to the matching engine.

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Risk Analysis on the Cloud (Using Excel and GigaSpaces)

Every day brings news of either more failures of the financial systems or out-right fraud, with the $50 billion Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme being the latest, breaking all records. This post provide a technical overview of a solution that was implemented for one of the largest banks in China. The solution illustrate how one can use Excel as a front end client and at the same time leverage cloud computing model and mapreduce as well as other patterns to scale-out risk calculations. I'm hoping that this type of approach will reduce the chances for seeing this type of fraud from happening in the future.

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