Nati Shalom's Blog

Saving cost using Application/Middleware virtualization

Earlier this week, I gave a joint webinar with James Liddle, where we outlined
practical guidelines for saving costs using middleware and application-level Virtualization:

• Saving the cost of peak/static provisioning using on-demand scaling
• Saving the downtime cost
• Saving costs through outsourcing part of our application and operations to the cloud
• Saving costs using application level optimization (doing more with less)
• Saving costs using platform consolidation to reduce the number of software components as well as utilize OpenSource and more commodity Software packages

Towards the end (Slide 20), Jim Liddle presented real life case studies from the iPhone launch in the UK and how some of hose principles have been applied to enable a successful launch in the UK.

Additionally, Jim went through some of the motivations and case studies that led different Telco, Online Gaming and Start-up companies to utilize our cloud, offering to gain better cost effectiveness.

For those who did not have the chance to participate in the webinar, we uploaded a recorded version of that presentation for you to view.

Savig cost using application level virtualization

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: computingvirtualization cloud)

I would like to point out a few specific items from this presentation:

Beyond Server Side Consolidation (Slide 5)

Server-Side-Consolidation (SSC) played an important role in bringing the concept of virtualization to mass adoption. It forced organization to be able to map their application into concrete packages and look at machines as a logical entity rather then just a physical entity. Server-Side-Consolidation also brought a relatively simple model for cost saving: Instead of running applications on dedicated HW you can consolidate them into one machine. By doing so, you can reduce the number of servers and save the hardware and the operational costs associated with that.

Having said that, SSC is only one *very narrow* aspect of virtualization that unfortunately became too coupled with Virtualization.

The next step is obviously to move from SSC to application and middleware level Virtualization. Application Virtualization refers to the opposite scenario. Instead of putting multiple applications on the same hardware, we are taking a given application and spreading it on a pool of machines. This holds significant potential for making applications more efficient. For example, just think of the saving potential gained by moving applications from static peak-load provisioning to on-demand provisioning. In addition to that, we can utilize commodity hardware resources to get the power of high end machines.

Practical steps ( Slide 19)

One of the main concerns that most people have WRT to application level virtualization is the effort associated with applying those principles.

The table below captures the value vs effort that we can receive with each part of our middleware and application level virtualization.
 

As you can see, there are steps that require non or very little changes to our application:
For example, taking an existing web application that requires 10 machines to meet certain peak load, however on average it needs only 3 machines.  Normally we would statically provision 10 machines to meet the peak load which means that on average those machines would be poorly utilized. .  Instead, we can provision our web container on-demand and use Pay-Per-Use model to pay only what is consumed. This will enable us to save roughly 7 machines (10 - 3 ) and wouldn't require any changes to our code. (You can learn how you can do that with GigaSpaces here)

If we have a computational business logic or even a rendering application (a good example of that is  Slideshare or Yutube). Those type of applications tend to deal with fluctuating loads. So if on average we consume 10 machines and for peak we need up to 90 machines - you will be able to save ~80 machines! by provisioning the computational/rendering machines on-demand. (See here on how to use GigaSpaces for MapReduce computation and here to learn on how to use the Actor model)  

On the messaging and data side, we can reduce the amount of machines and the cost of scaling by partioning our messaging or data thus enabling linear scaling of those layers. In addition to that utilizing memory resources instead of files provide a significant boosst in performance. The combination of the two enables us to utilize commodity software and hardware resources instead of high-end resources - for example we don't need to rely on high-end databases, we can simply use MySQL.

Final Words

In this presentation we tried to gather most of the knowledge based on our past experience. Most of these lessons are generic and not necessarily specific to GigaSpaces.

I also tried to provide some practical implementation guidelines (Slide 19):

• Avoid radical change, enabling a gradual process
• Choose an architecture supporting linear scalability
• Minimize vendor lock-in
• • Enable application portability and freedom of choice of:
  • • Cloud provider, Web container, Programming language, Database
  • Minimize API lock in:
  • • Use of standards
    • API Abstractions – when standards are not available
• Future proof your application
• • Don’t make decisions today, but be ready to make one without major effort
  • Avoid long-term commitment – choose the right licensing model

Real life case studies:

•

I would like to encourage you again to listen to the case studies (Slide 20) and learn how others  apply some of those principles in their local-IT and Cloud.

Additional references:

• New quick-start guide shows how you can easily scale your on-demand scaling to your EXISTING web application.
• New whitepaper: Survival Guide for IT During the Economic Meltdown
  

GigaSpaces 2008-2009

As 2009 begins to unfold and 2008 comes to a close, I thought I would share with you a summary of how things turned out for us at GigaSpaces this last year.

On the positive side – we have seen a great surge of interest from customers in industries that were not our usual profile in the past. More than 50 new customers to be exact. In particular – I want to mention web-commerce as a rapidly growing application profile we are seeing emerging as well as new OEM deals where were seeing GigaSpaces embedded with other product such as the integration with Mule-ESB. This may very well be related to the other great development of 2008 – The release of version 6.6 and our built-in support for seamless web application scaling. We just launched a new quick-start-guide that provides a complete walk through example on how to scale an existing web application here. This release was also marked by what we believe to be the biggest potential for GigaSpaces moving forward – Cloud Computing. Release 6.6 added a host of new features in this area – with more to come in our upcoming 7.0 release. .In particular I'd like to point to our continued support for web application with major enhancement to our Local-Cache support, Session replication and load-balancer integration that will fit better with web application behavior. 7.0 release will also add support for Sun Glassfish along side of our existing Jetty support. This will enable users to deploy a full JEE compliant application on our SLA driven environment and benefit from the self-healing, auto-scaling, and performance as well as from our built-in cloud-enablement along side other enhancement .This is quite exciting if I add to that our recent announcement with MySQL as well as our integration with Sun Grid Engine and Java Real Time. Were progressing full speed ahead with other areas as well such as .Net where we added support for Native Local cache as well as support for Event Driven development. On the cloud front as some have you noticed we've made quite a progress this year. We've been chosen as Best Cloud Application Provider 2008, top 100 cloud players. I'm also happy to announce that we already have more than 25 new customers using GigaSpaces on Amazon-EC2 coming from both Enterprise and Startups. And this is even before we declared a public-beta of our new cloud-framework. We also planning a series of new updates on that front – stay tuned.

Towards the end of 2008, and given the deteriorating macro economic situation, we have decided to accelerate what we believe will be the 2 pillars of our strategy moving forward: indirect sales through partners (regional/domain specific System Integrators) and the Cloud. This means we are significantly shifting our go-to-market towards activities that will extend our reach beyond the direct sales we have done until now. We are already heavily engaged in joint sales (including some closed deals) with more than 20 regional (across most of APAC, Western, Northern and Eastern Europe to Brazil and of course the US) as well as domain-specific (in the areas of Grid, Cloud, Fin Svcs and Telecom) SIs that form the backbone of our tier-1 SI and go-to-market partners. This change will allow us to achieve our last key objective for 2009 – ensure profitability even in the face of the unpredictable market condition.

This last objective became more important as the full impact of the economic crisis hit in mid-2008. It became evident that 2008 will not be the kind of growth year that the market had planned for a year earlier (GigaSpaces Ranked Third in Deloitte Israel Technology Fast 50). Further more it is clear that 2009 may even be a worse year in terms of the general macro-economic conditions. Given these economic conditions, we have reassessed our aggressive growth targets, and accordingly adjusted the size of our organization to ensure the company is profitable moving forward even under the worsening economic scenarios. Should market conditions prove us wrong over the next couple of quarters, we plan to go back to our original growth plans. However - this has lead to what I consider the hardest part for me in 2008. We have had to let go some good people and good friends who have been with us for some time. It is never easy to part ways with friends – but like everyone else (including some of our customers…) we had to take the steps necessary to ensure profitability given that the short term future market conditions are very unpredictable. I’m glad that at least this change hardly affected our R&D and support teams – and we are continuing to invest in both product enhancements and customer satisfaction.

So all in all – not a terrible year – but could have been better. I look forward with anticipation for 2009 to see how the recent changes we’ve made in strategy and go-to-market will play out. We all remain strong in our belief that directions we have taken recently, coupled with the very powerful and mature technology we’ve created and the Cloud Computing model, have the potential of addressing the market needs even more in these times.

I'd like to close by one of my favorite quotes this days from Tim Oreilly:

“if you look at history, you see that this has always and everywhere been true. (…) Great problems are also great opportunities for those who know how to solve them. And looking ahead, I can see great opportunities.”

Tim O’Reilly, Thoughts on the Financial Crisis, O’Reilly Radar

Blog status

Dear friends

Just wanted to update you that in the next coming weeks i will not be  writing as frequent as i did before due to a small bike accident.

I'm looking for a good speech-to-text application to help me go through this period.
Did anyone had any good experience with such application?

Thanks.

Getting ready for the cloud

In the past few months, I have been speaking in various conferences about cloud computing.
In my presentations, I tried to focus primarily on how one can take practical steps to benefit from the cloud today. To illustrate my points, I used GigaSpaces as the scale-out application server and Amazon EC2 as the cloud infrastructure and thus demonstrated how one can deploy EXISTING java applications on the cloud 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 
  • No code or configuration change is required between the two environments
  • Develop local - test on the cloud
  • Built for iterative development

In addition, I demonstrated the use of our new Cloud tools framework which enabled me to fully automate the entire application provisioning process on the cloud. This tool enabled me to:

• Deploy load balancer
• Cluster web containers
• Cluster application processing units
• MySQL database connected to EBS

And all that through a single click deployment.

In the demonstration, I also showed how you can benefit from the cloud:

• Dynamically scale when the load breaches a certain threshold
• New web containers are dynamically linked to the load-balancer (no configuration change is required as all is taken care of on the fly).
• Self healing - if something breaks, scale-down to existing machine while getting a new machine ready.

The entire presentation can be viewed online 

GigaSpaces - Getting Ready For The Cloud

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: amazon gigaspaces)

You can also view the online video presentation that i gave in the Cloud Summit in Tel Aviv where i ran a live demo of our new cloud infrastructure on EC2 demonstrating both dynamic scaling and also what happens when machine fails in front of a live audience!

The video recording of this presentation is available here

If you want to try to run the demo yourself and you don't have an Amazon user - just drop an email to cloud at gigaspaces dot com and will send you a free pass to the early access program.


Enjoy!