Nati Shalom's Blog

GigaSpaces Customer Conference, Part 2

I started writing about the GigaSpaces customer conference in part I of this post. Here is the rest of it.

The most surprising presentation for me was the presentation by Neil Vernon, Senior Product Manager at SmartStream.  SmartStream is one of the leading providers of Transaction Lifecycle Management (TLM) solutions. We started engaging with them about a year ago, when I first presented our Space-Based Architecture (SBA) approach for scaling stateful applications. At the time they weren't even using Java and made a strategic decision to move their legacy application code to Java. They did a very thorough evaluation of our product. The goal of the evaluation was to determine that SBA can truly deliver linear scalability in high-throughput, stateful environments, as we had claimed. During the PoC we built together a small-scale SBA equivalent of their legacy system and ran different benchmarks against it. Not surprisingly, the results showed a perfect graph of linear scalability, i.e., the throughput grew with direct proportion to the number of instances in the cluster and the number of loaders. They were also using our Service Grid to deploy and scale their entire application (not just the data part of it). In addition, they interviewed large investment banks to get their view on a solution that is based on GigaSpaces as the platform. The response they received was extremely positive and showed that our customers view SBA as a competitive advantage. In the process, we also learned a few things about their negotiations skills (I won’t dwell on that, so as not to embarrass our sales guys. Seems like we can learn a few tricks from them

Next came Alejandro Ramallo from British American Tobacco (aka BAT, the world's second largest in their category), one of our earliest customers. Alejandro bought into the JavaSpaces model in the early days, and built a grid-based order processing system with our implementation. His application uses a “master/worker” pattern, which takes orders from field agents and parallel processes them in the backend system. This enables BAT to scale easily as the number of orders and/or field agents grows. [BTW, they are using our 2.5 (!) release in production for more than 4 years without any problem.] Using this approach they where able to replace large, expensive boxes with 15 commodity machines, and achieve a 12x performance gain. Alejandro is now working on a similar initiative in the UK. Way to go, Alejandro!

Baruch Chasid, CTO of TraderTools, presented their global order management system, built entirely in .Net. TraderTools is one of the world's leading suppliers of electronic Foreign Exchange (eFX) white-label software solutions. Their application distributes trade orders and market data across several geographical locations using our distributed clustering mechanism to synchronize the data between the different sites. In order to save WAN bandwidth, each site is maintains its own copy of the order book. Traders use that copy to get updates on market data and orders without going through the WAN.

Next to present was Steve Colwill, Principal at PSJ Solutions, a close partner of ours for several years now. They have been working with some of our customers in the UK helping them implement their applications on top of GigaSpaces. As part of this work they have developed a set of complementary solutions for task monitoring, management and utilities that simplify and shorten the development cycle significantly.

In this specific session Steve presented how they have built for a customer a reliable, distributed order management system with a service-oriented architecture (SOA) using GigaSpaces. He also presented an impressive tool they had built for that customer to handle real-time monitoring of Space activity for operations and real-time business information for a leading telco operator, using GigaSpaces of course. They used Space Based Architecture to maintain workflow between their services and they used the master/worker pattern to parallelize and scale-out the transaction processing work associated with the order processing. They used our persistent space capabilities to handle transparent persistence of the data. The application replaced an existing one, which used a traditional monolithic approach that was very fragile due to the tight coupling among the various application components. This tight coupling led to major failure of their system during the Christmas rush. Since they've been using GigaSpaces, their system has been running in production for a while without any failure.

An interesting point here is that one of the organization’s back-end systems suffered a major failure and was down for several days. Once the system was recovered, all the orders stored in the GigaSpaces application during those days were pooled immediately and executed resulting in zero data loss! You can read an interesting testimonial about that project here. These days, PSJ is working on a Java-based global order management system in Hong Kong, similar to the one TraderTools is building in .Net.

The next session was given by Sebastian Titakis, Project Manager, Commerzbank AG. He presented architecture for speeding up their analytics using GigaSpaces in their risk data for credit applications. They’re using some of our recent Spring stuff and will be among the first converting to our new 6.0 release. They integrated our solution with SunGard mathematical libraries for executing their calculations. Sebastian emphasized how easy it was to develop a highly scalable and flexible application using the GigaSpaces SBA approach.

Biju Potty, Infosys MiFID Solution Group, then presented how they use GigaSpaces as a core component of its new MiFID Execution Solution. Solutions around MiFID are in high demand these days in Europe. In the session, Biju demonstrated how GigaSpaces was integrated with Infosys' post-trade surveillance & reporting best execution solution and made it highly scalable to meet high-volume, near real-time computation requirements.

The final presentation of the day was given by me. I presented our 6.0 XAP (eXtreme Application Platform) release and our future roadmap for scaling out of the entire application in a simple and easy way using our new OpenSpaces framework. I was happy to see that even at such a late hour of a long day, the audience was highly engaged and there were plenty of questions coming from the crowd mostly in the area of how SBA and OpenSpaces relate to SOA, as well as questions about migrating from an existing GigaSpaces environment to 6.0. 

BTW, you can find good answers to these questions on our new 6.0 Wiki pages. Specifically, I suggest looking at OpenSpaces FAQ and  XAP Overview. Owen Taylor provides additional useful links here. You can now also download our 6.0 RC1 – check it out.

After hearing all those success stories and how customers view the value of what we’re doing, it was pretty evident that linear scalability is the primary objective our customers are looking for -- and were able to achieve with our technology. SBA is real and working in production systems in the most mission critical applications. It also seems that the direction we took with the 6.0 release and OpenSpaces was right on the money and addresses some of the major concerns related to learning curve, development complexity, etc. It was also pretty clear that everyone in that room felt that we’re witnessing the creation of a revolutionary approach that is going to change how distributed application are built. I could actually feel the excitement build in the room.

For those who missed the event – sorry. We can partly make it up to you as we videotaped all of the sessions and some of the presenters have allowed us to make them publicly available on our web site (coming soon).

After Hours

At the end of the event we had some food and an open bar available in an adjacent room in the hotel – as well as various games (foosball, ping pong, etc.). Thanks go to our partners at BEA Systems who sponsored the cocktail. Amir Prescher from Voltaire was able to beat myself, Onn and Michael Mitrani in almost every game – I don't know if that says something about our gaming skills at GigaSpaces.  My excuse is that I was pretty exhausted after all this excitement. I was so exhausted I literally crashed during the dinner party in one of the nice London restaurants (at that point of time I literally lost consciousness so don't expect any recommendation, I don't even have a clue where it was).

That’s it for the Customer Conference. Finally, I want to give a big thanks to our EMEA and marketing teams for putting together such a successful event.

GigaSpaces Customer Conference, Excel Demo

In Part I of my series of posts on the GigaSpaces European Customer Conference, I said Dekel Tankel from GigaSpaces presented a demo of our joint solution with Microsoft around scaling out Excel. Here are some more details.

The demo showed how you can deploy the GigaSpaces SLA-driven In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) through the GigaSpaces containers, which also hosted the feed handler that was deployed into those containers as a Spring-based POJO service. The demo used distributed dependency injection to synchronize between the feeder and the spaces: the feeder got injected with a reference of the space once the space became available. The Excel service subscribed to the Data Grid, based on some filter criteria, and got the feed from the Data Grid pushed directly into the Excel console. The demo showed how you could monitor cluster health, and drill-down and look for the data contained in the Data Grid instances using a SQL viewer. Dekel then demonstrated how you can seamlessly recover from failure while the application continues to work as if nothing happened.

GigaSpaces Customer Conference, Part 1

Time flies when you're having fun.

It's already been two weeks since our London customer conference. I was trying to get around to write a summary of the event but didn’t get a chance, as things have been so busy at GigaSpaces these days. Its good that I have to travel sometimes (SpringOne, in this particular case – more on that on another post), so I get some time to do it on the plane...

AS I wrote this, it became quite lengthy so I chopped it up into several posts. Below is Part 1:

The GigaSpaces European Customer Conference was extremely successful – with more than 100 attendees. It was a great opportunity to meet great long-time supporters, such as Julian Browne, WiIliam Todd, Andy Doddington, Baruch Chasid, Alejandro Ramallo,  as well as Phil, Steve and John from PSJ Solutions (I’m sure I missed a few – please forgive me). All have been quite influential on our product roadmap and technology direction.

The event started with a visionary talk from Yaron Benvenisti,our CEO, who discussed some of the company stats and industry trends. Yaron described in a very clear and precise way, as he always does, the convergence of SOA, EDA, Compute Grids and Data Grids. He described why this leads to a new era in middleware, in which GigaSpaces and its customers are playing a major role in shaping and driving the next generation middleware stack.

He presented the hyper-growth we've been experiencing over the past few years (nearly 300% in 2006), dozens of customers in production, and more than 100 employees in the U.S., UK, Germany, France, India and Asia-Pacific. I must admit that even I was a bit impressed (we’re running at such a speed that I don't even have the time to take a step back and look at all these great achievements from time to time).

Yaron’s session was followed by a session from Koen Van den Brande, CTO of Microsoft Financial Services in EMEA, who gave a joint presentation with Dekel Tankel, GigaSpaces Director of Technical Alliances. Dekel demonstrated our new joint solution with Microsoft, addressing common scaling requirements around the use of Excel for analytical applications in the financial industry. Dekel showed a cool demo of how you can drive real-time market data feeds into Excel and address major scalability issues, such as the amount of data that can be loaded, the way data is distributed and shared among the traders, and how traders can share common business logic. 

More about this solution here, and Geva Perry discusses it here.

Next up: Andy Doddington, who was definitely one of the stars of the show – the brilliant cynic at his best. In this specific case he had good reason: he actually solved many of the above Excel issues a while ago and took a different approach using eclipse RDB as the rich client framework, which entirely focuses on addressing analytical applications.

You can find more details about this project in one of my recent posts on the GigaSpaces Blog: Excel that Scales: Grid Meets the Middle Office.

It was interesting to hear how they started their project loading relatively small data-sets, and were able to triple the load over less then a year without any change to their application code, just by adding more GigaSpaces instances.

Andy also talked about the work that our development team has been doing together with his group at BofA and with Interface21. This three-way cooperation was a major influence on our 6.0 product roadmap and Spring integration strategy. It was nice to hear that BofA has several applications in production for a while using the GigaSpaces-Spring approach and they are looking for extending it to more applications. I would like to use this opportunity and personally thank everyone on the BofA team who is working on this project: Yuri in particular, as well as the teams in NY and Chicago, who are already running about two dozen GigaSpaces applications within different parts of the bank, all that in a period of slightly more than a year! They have been a very collaborative partner, something that I aspire to have with other customers around the globe.

That's it for Part I. More on the GigaSpaces European Customer Conference in Part II.

What does it mean to support Spring

One of the biggest investment with the new GigaSpaces XAP release is our Spring support through a new development framework named OpenSpaces. While many vendors are declaring support for Spring these days, not everyone is doing the same level of integration. Many are using Spring just for simplifying the configuration, others like many of the J2EE vendors enable the deployment of Spring into their containers, other initiative provides different Add-ons to Spring.

 

Adrian Colyer from interface21 summarized nicely in his blog post what does it mean to support Spring:

He outlined specifically the areas in Spring which should be utilized to support the "Spring spirit" and pointed specifically the areas GigaSpaces release that support those items:

 

• Allow configuration to be managed by Spring. At the most basic level this means having a set of configuration metadata classes that can be wired up as Spring beans in an application context. Avoid creating your own custom configuration files and formats if at all possible. To further simplify things for your users, you might consider adding support for a Spring namespace that makes it easier to configure things. Gigaspace provide a "gigaspaces" namespace for example allowing elements such as <gigaspaces:config> and <gigaspaces:caching> to be used directly in a Spring configuration file.

• Use the Spring abstractions and design idioms in your API. For example, the notion of a "Template" is very familiar to Spring users. GigaSpaces provide a "GigaSpacesTemplate".

• Support unit and integration testing. Design your API in such a way that it is easy to unit test and integration test business logic in a Spring application that uses your product.

• Integrate with the infrastructure services abstractions used by Spring. For example, GigaSpaces' JMS and JDBC abstraction can be used directly with Spring. GigaSpaces also provides several implementations of Spring's PlatformTransactionManager to allow the Spring framework to demarcate space-based transactions

When we designed OpenSpaces we also thought on area's in which we could extend the Spring framework under that same "Spring Spirit" that  Adrian mentioned:

•    OpenSpaces utilizes Spring as the POJO development infrastructure and adds runtime and development components for developing POJO-driven EDA/SOA applications and scale them out across a pool of machines in a simple way – without dependency on JEE container.

– Processing Unit: The core unit of work, which encapsulates the middleware as well as the business logic as a single unit of scale and fail-over.

– SLA-Driven Container: A lightweight container that enables dynamic deployment of Processing Units over a pool of machines based on machine availability, CPU utilization, capabilities and other criteria.

– In-Memory Data Grid: Provides in-memory distributed data storage.

– Declarative Event Containers: For triggering events from the Space into POJOs in either pull or push mode.

– Remoting: Utilizes the Space as the underlying transport for invoking remote methods on POJO services that "live" within a Processing Unit. With this approach a client can invoke a method on a POJO service even if it changes its physical location. It can re-route requests to available services in case of fail-over etc.

– Declarative transaction support for the GigaSpaces In-Memory Data Grid.

– OSGI-Like Deployment Model: To enable simple packaging of application bundles and manage their lifecycle independent of the Processing Unit.

What does that mean for a Spring user?

Spring users can use the openspaces framework for high-availability and scalability of their application – without being dependent on a J2EE container – using a lightweight SLA-driven container. They can thus benefit from the simplicity of Spring throughout the entire application and deployment environment. Having said that It is important to note that this framework kept compatible with J2EE and can be easily deployed within J2EE containers – so it is compatible but independent with J2EE.

 

 

 

GigaSpaces Users Conference, London, June 12

We're hosting a GigaSpaces Users Conference in  London tomorrow, Tuesday, June 12th.

You can find more details about the event on Geva's blog here.

"What is particularly cool about this is that most of the presentations will be given by GigaSpaces customers on how they are using the product."

In this event I'm going to unveil some of the stuff we have been working on for our new release (6.0). We're going to name this release XAP, which stands for eXterme Application Platform (pronounced Zap). The release is a major milestone for us.  Many of the ideas and concepts behind the release were inspired by those same customers and partners that are going to present at the London event.

Beyond covering the new release, we'll be discussing the answers to the questions listed below, which we have been hearing from our customers and partners in anticipation of this event. I would be very interested in getting more such questions and I'll do my best to cover all of them during the event (and if not, then on my blog), so feel free to shoot me more questions of this kind. Note that I kept the questions anonymous, as I'm not sure those involved would have liked them to be published.

A lead architect from a large global European investment bank asked: "We see an increasing convergence between data virtualization, distributed caching and grid technologies. How does GigaSpaces see the future in this context and how are you preparing for it?"

The same architect asked about how we intend to help train and make our customers successful with the platform: "How does GigaSpaces intend to develop and encourage independent technology evangelists around its platform? Today if we want to hire a distributed data cache expert who is proficient enough to help us make a platform decision, it may be difficult because such people are hard to come by. One way to encourage this may be through the use of certifications, but this may be onerous for the company of your size, but  perhaps providing documentation on best practices, recommended patterns, reference architectures and making them openly available may be helpful. In the short run it may affect your consulting revenue but in the long run it will boost the credibility of your product base."

An executive from a very large Latin American consumer goods company asked about how GigaSpaces can work in conjunction with other SOA products: "What benefits can you provide in an SOA/ESB COTS based environment?"

A telco customer from the UK asked: "I would be keen to see overviews of architectures that use GigaSpaces in environments that are not specific to crunching numbers as fast as possible, i.e. messaging, scalability, redundancy, etc... Virgin's ordering system would be a good example."

And, finally, many customers asked about our future roadmap.

So like I said, we'll be covering all this and more at our customer event tomorrow.

If you have more questions just post them here or send me a email directly.