[infinispan-dev] Infinispan within JBossAS

Manik Surtani manik at jboss.org
Fri Apr 30 05:28:23 EDT 2010


On 29 Apr 2010, at 19:00, Dimitris Andreadis wrote:

> Hi guys,
> 
> I'll be doing a short talk about JBoss 6 & Infinispan at a local conference:
> 
> "This presentation introduces Infinispan, the new underlying data caching and replication 
> infrastructure included with the upcoming JBoss AS 6. Infinispan is an Open Source library 
> that can be used independently of JBoss AS to let you build dynamic and highly available 
> data grids that scale to the order of thousands, while offering a large number of enterprise 
> features."
> 
> I need some help to identify the key benefits of using Infinispan in the context of AS.
> 
> - Why is it going to be better from JBoss Cache?
> - What are the major use cases we are addressing?

From a JBossAS perspective (for now at least) I believe it is all of the same stuff JBoss Cache did: EJB and HTTP session replication, JPA 2nd Level Cache.

> The obvious ones are
> 
> - smaller memory footprint
> - faster

Both of the above, but also greater scalability (larger clusters), lower overhead when new nodes join existing clusters (--> faster startup)

> But I need more, in terms of how it will affect
> 
> - session/sfsb replication
> - jpa/entity caching invalidation, 2nd level caching

Nothing new in terms of "features" (over what JBoss Cache offered), except perhaps finer grained control over eviction settings for the JPA 2nd Level Cache.  Galder can comment more here.

> - other?

The ability for people to use a data grid directly, in their applications, as an alternative data store.

> Beyond the "standard" usage of Infinispan replacing JBossCache in AS, I need usecases of 
> datagrids used in the context of AS deployments. Is it going to be used primarily as a 
> read-mostly cache? Do you have some examples?

Some typical scenarios would be to front "expensive" data stores, web services, etc., in which case you are looking at a read-mostly cache.  But other use cases also include a complete datastore replacement.  Fast, scalable, transactional, in-memory durable datastore.

> I'm trying to imagine applications that would really benefit by the JBossAS/Infinispan 
> combination when deployed in the cloud in really large numbers (e.g. hundred of AS 
> instances). Would a special architecture design would need to be used in this case?

Depends on the level if durability expected.  For example, tuning your cache store for overflow/persistence is one area where you can exercise the tradeoff between performance and durability.  Sync or async network communications come into play as well.

> Finally, do you have some standalone Infinispan usage examples?

Yes - a lot of what I have seen involve grid-based applications that farm out tasks to a grid of processor nodes that also need access to data.  Traditional data stores become bottlenecks very quickly in such cases, so storing data in a distributed fashion is key.  Having data locality and storing stuff in memory (low latency) are added pluses.  

> I think it will be great if we can associate/match Infinispan (within AS) to real people 
> problems and usecases.

It will primarily centre around scalability/fast, low-latency data access.  There will also be the ability to stack "tiers" of data grids with the client/server stuff we're doing.  So this gives you access to large amounts of storage space.  

And cloud-scale deployments, where you need fast startup regardless of cluster size, elastic scale out/scale in, etc.  Here is a quick diagram I pieced together some time back, for a "stateless" app server (which will be necessary to achieve app server elasticity).  Note that this is just a concept, hasn't been decided upon that this will happen in JBoss AS yet, etc.

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HTH
Manik

> 
> Thanks for the help!
> 
> /Dimitris
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> infinispan-dev at lists.jboss.org
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--
Manik Surtani
manik at jboss.org
Lead, Infinispan
Lead, JBoss Cache
http://www.infinispan.org
http://www.jbosscache.org






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