GigaSpaces’ upcoming cloud framework

Recently I had the pleasure of doing a demo to one of our customers using the new “cloud framework”.

This framework brings forth 3 key concepts, which we think are essential to successfully develop, test and deploy any scalable transaction applications on the cloud:

“Desktop on the cloud”
View the cloud environment, as if it was your own desktop. You can develop and unit-test using any familiar IDE and then deploy it to the cloud for testing with zero code-changes. In addition the distributed environment in which you deploy and run your code does not affect your business logic. At GigaSpaces, we call it “write once, scale anywhere”

“One-Click cloud”
Once your application is unit-tested and running on your desktop, you can seamlessly transition and scale it on a large number of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) without any configuration, administration or application changes. This is a key concept behind the idea of “pay as you go” in the cloud. As I wrote in a previous post it’s great that Amazon charges $0.40 an hour for a large machine, but if it takes 4 weeks to deploy my application to this environment, it is no longer that attractive. This framework really set the above as a practical reality.

Scale on demand
I have discussed the missing link between on-demand Hardware (like EC2) and on-demand scalability in a recent post. In this demo I deploy a market-data application with one click, then with another click from my laptop, I add more AMIs and the application simply scales! (by increasing the amount of stock symbols being processed..)

I have to remove my hat (I bought one especially for that…) to our amazing development team – with our new cloud framework, you can take your “mini application” (we call it "processing unit") and literally deploy it to any number of AMIs in one click – behind the scenes, the framework launches the AMIs, start the GigaSpaces containers (GSCs) and deploys your code to the Gigaspaces-EC2 cluster.
It even starts the GigaSpaces Graphical Management Center in the cloud and automatically connect your desktop to it from any internet browser.
All of this magic requires one simple “unzip” to a few Megs of the cloud package and an AWS user credentials. All the GigaSpaces runtime is pre-configured on our AMIs.

The above is the slide I’m using for the demo, which I hope, help clarify what I wrote... a picture worth a thousand words, right?

This cool staff is already available as a private beta and until our formal release we plan other exciting features like support for the recently announced Elastic Block Storage (EBS) using our Persistency as a Service model, support for MySQL, monitoring the AMIs status and more...

If you want access to the private beta, please contact us at ec2@gigaspaces.com

Cheers
Dekel