11:28 a.m.
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.
HTH
Manik
Thanks for the help!
/Dimitris
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--
Manik Surtani
manik(a)jboss.org
Lead, Infinispan
Lead, JBoss Cache
http://www.infinispan.org
http://www.jbosscache.org
