High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

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.

Data centers are reshaping themselves by taking ideas from public cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google. The idea is to make the data center more cost-effective by enabling on-demand utility-based computing rather than dedicated machines. At the same time, it is clear that to make IT operations more effective, it doesn't make sense to run all the applications that are currently hosted in a company's data center in the private cloud. This calls for an integration between private and public cloud. In this post i discuss some of the challenges involved in making that happen:
1. How do we design applications to be cloud-agnostic?
2. How do we enable seamless fail-over to a public cloud?
3. Future-proofing: There are many cases in which we can't make a clear decision as to where our application should be running at the time of writing or developing the application. We would like to be in a position to change the decision as to where our application will be running even after our application has been completely developed.

This post describes how you can create a federated management model using JMX standard API. Applications that are already using a standard JMX interface can plug-in the new federated implementation without changing the application code and without introducing additional performance overhead.

One particularly interesting EC2 third party provider is GigaSpaces with their XAP platform that provides in memory transactions backed up to a database. The in memory transactions appear to scale linearly across machines thus providing a distributed in-memory datastore that gets backed up to persistent storage.

Compares MapReduce to other parallel processing approaches and suggests new paradigm for clouds and grids

Scalability forces us to think differently. What worked on a small scale doesn't always work on a large scale -- and costs are no different. If 90% of our application is free of contention, and only 10% is spent on a shared resources, we will need to grow our compute resources by a factor of 100 to scale by a factor of 10! Another important thing to note is that 10x, in this case, is the limit of our ability to scale, even if more resources are added.

1. The cost of non-linearly scalable applications grows exponentially with the demand for more scale.
2. Non-linearly scalable applications have an absolute limit of scalability. According to Amdhal's Law, with 10% contention, the maximum scaling limit is 10. With 40% contention, our maximum scaling limit is 2.5 - no matter how many hardware resources we will throw at the problem.

This post discuss in further details how to measure the true cost of non linearly scalable systems and suggest a model for reducing that cost significantly.

A lot has been said already about Twitter's scalability issues. Many have given Twitter as an anti-pattern of how not to deal with scalability and have suggested different solutions for scaling it. As Twitter is famously a Ruby-on-Rails deployment, this case has also been used as a weapon in the language/platform wars between the RoR and Java camps, and to a lesser degree, also with the LAMP (PHP) camp

Recently, Google announced Google App Engine, another announcement in the rapidly growing world of cloud computing. This brings up some very serious questions:

1. If we want to take advantage of one of the clouds, are we doomed to be locked-in for life?
2. Must we re-write our existing applications to use the cloud?
3. Do we need to learn a brand new technology or language for the cloud?

This post presents a pattern that will enable us to abstract our application code from the underlying cloud provider infrastructure. This will enable us to easily migrate our EXISTING applications to cloud based environment thus avoiding the need for a complete re-write.

GigaSpaces launched OpenSpaces.org, a community web site for developers who wish to utilize and contribute to the open source OpenSpaces development framework.

OpenSpaces extends the Spring Framework for enterprise Java development, and leverages the GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) for data caching, messaging and as the container for application business logic. It is designed for building highly-available, scale-out applications in distributed environments, such as SOA, cloud computing, grids and commodity servers. OpenSpaces is widely used in a variety of industries, including financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing and retail -- and across the web in e-commerce, Web 2.0 applications such as social networking sites, search and more.

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:

1. Go to the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge Web site
2. Read the Challenge guidelines and FAQs
3. Develop a killer application or plug-in based on OpenSpaces
4. OPTIONAL: Submit their application concept by January 29 to be eligible for the ten $1,000 "early bird" prizes
5. Submit their actual application (including code) by April 2, 2008

Additional information on the Challenge is available here .