Boston Scalability
User Group

Hello everyone,

I’m sure you’ve noticed we haven’t had a BostonSUG meeting in nearly a year.  In the time that we held meetings from 2008-2009 I received overwhelmingly positive feedback about the speakers we invited to our meetings and the technical ability level of our members.  That said, it’s time to restart our monthly meetings with a slightly different approach.

The meeting that we had the most vocal feedback about was our Scalability Roundtable meeting last March.  The feedback for this meeting was fantastic as far as experiments go.  We had a lot of people in attendance, both familiar and new faces.  Going forward, more of our meetings will be in the roundtable format with more lightning talks and shared experiences led by our members.  We’re still interested in having more speakers come in but those meetings would be less common than in the past.

Starting this month we will resume our monthly meetings on the fourth Wednesday of the month.  That means our next meeting is February 24 at 6 p.m., location TBD.  We still have our IBM Innovation Center meeting location available, though the only problem is that there is no internet connectivity available to user groups that meet there.  We’ve also had success meeting up at Bertucci’s, just a quick drive over 128 from IBM.

Sometimes we may not have a set agenda, like for our original roundtable last March.  However I strongly encourage you to send ideas and suggestions for topics along so we can do any research needed before the meeting.  I also invite any lightning talks you may want to present.  It doesn’t have to be a formal presentation or prepared slides or anything fancy.  If you want to talk about a particular topic for 10-20 minutes please let me know so I can put it on the agenda.

At our meeting on February 24 I will give a lightning talk on Redis, a data structures server implemented in C with client libraries in many popular languages.

Please send any suggestions or feedback to anthony@bostonsug.org.  Keep an eye on our web site bostonsug.org for more announcements.  I will send out more info on our next meeting as soon as I get a confirmed meeting location.  I’ll see everyone on the 24th!

Anthony Chaves

BostonSUG meets again next week at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, MA.  The meeting is on Wednesday March 25 at 6 p.m.

This month we’ll share our experience with building and deploying applications and making them scalable.  This is an open-ended discussion with no specific agenda or technology on the table.  Instead we’ll share what we’ve learned to build scalable software.

Of course specific software will come up during the discussion and we’ll delve into use-cases, advantages the software brings and also the debt we accrue because of it.  Topics here include anything from in-house data grids to memcached on EC2 and everything in between.

Not only should we look at the past and present, we’ll also discuss some interesting possibilities for future development projects.  Hadoop on EC2 is gaining popularity, Rails 3 is due sometime this year – how do these help us build scalable software?

Building scalable applications is one thing but how do we gain the popularity and usage patterns that require real scalability?  Share your opinions and experience at next week’s meeting!

Date: Wednesday March 25
Time: 6 p.m.
Location: IBM Innovation Center 404 Wyman St. (North Entrance) Waltham, MA 02451

If you think you will attend this meeting please register at our registration page.  Attendance is always free and you can attend even if you don’t register.

If you can’t make it to this meeting but want to find out about future meetings you can join our announcement list.

Please send any feedback to anthony@bostonsug.org.

See you next week!

Our next meeting is Wednesday March 25 at 6 p.m.

This will be an informal meeting without a set topic or presentation.  Instead I’d like to have the round-table discussion that was originally scheduled for January.

Do you have questions about the best use of Amazon Web Services?  What are the pros and cons of using an event-based architecture?  Have you got experience using memcached that you’d like to share?  Still unsure of why you’d want to use a data grid like Coherence or WebSphere eXtreme Scale?  This is the meeting you’ve been waiting for if you have these questions or answers to them.  Bring any questions or experience you have to the table and we’ll all come away from the meeting more knowledgeable and capable of building scalable applications.  Topics are not limited to those listed here.

We will also look ahead at what is to come in the rest of 2009.  Will Rails 3.0 be the platform of choice for building scalable apps?  How will Open Source Java projects like Hibernate Shards fair in ‘09?  Does Google AppEngine have what it takes to gain major marketshare?  What will define “Cloud Computing” this year and how will you use it in your projects?  When does it make sense to virtualize your infrastructure?

We’ll meet at the IBM Innovation Center.  404 Wyman St. North Entrance Waltham, MA 02451.  We’ll get started around 6 p.m.  Everyone is welcome and attendance is always free.

Please register for the meeting if you think you will attend.  Registering helps us make a guess about how much food to get.

Can’t make this meeting but want to find out about future meetings?  Sign up for our announcement list.

You can send questions, comments and feedback to anthony@bostonsug.org.

See you on the 25th at 6 p.m.!

This is just a reminder that our February meeting is tomorrow night.  All the meeting details are at the meeting announcement page.  Nati Shalom, GigaSpaces CTO and scalability blogger, will speak about the challenges of dynamic scaling and space-based architecture.

We’ll get started at 6 p.m.  See you tomorrow night!

Wednesday February 18 at 6 p.m. BostonSUG hosts a presentation by GigaSpaces co-founder and CTO Nati Shalom.  Nati runs a notable cloud computing blog and is an industry expert with distributed technology.  This talk will cover several different topics including:

• Dynamically scaling your application based on current demand
• Situations where space-based architecture is useful
• Infrastructure fault tolerance and self-healing
• Virtualizing servers “in the cloud”
• The effect latency has on scalability

Nati’s blog is a great source of information for anyone interested in building scalable applications.  This talk is sure to be informative based solely on the content of his blog.  Nati is an experienced technologist and he helps large financial firms and telcom companies build out their services to handle extreme load.

As usual we meet at the IBM Innovation Center.  The address is 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451.  The meeting start time is 6 p.m. on Wednesday February 18.

Meeting registration is now open.  Please register for the meeting if you plan to attend.  Of course you can come if you don’t register.  Everyone is welcome and attendance is free.

If you can’t make this meeting but want to find out about future BostonSUG meetings you can join our announcement list.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions you can reach me at anthony@bostonsug.org.  See you on the 18th!

We have to reschedule tonight’s meeting due to the weather.  Please be on the lookout for the new meeting date.  In the next day or so I will send out both the rescheduled meeting date and the announcement for our regularly scheduled February meeting.

Hello everyone,

The first BostonSUG meeting of 2009 is next Wednesday!  January 28 at 6 p.m. we meet at the IBM Innovation Center for our first technology round-table.  We’ll have snacks and water during the meeting. The IBM Innovation Center is located at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451.  See the original meeting announcement for all the details.  Don’t forget to register if you plan to attend.  Of course you can attend even if you don’t register.  Attendance is always free.

Anthony

BostonSUG is back after a short winter break!  Our first meeting of 2009 takes place on Wednesday January 28 at 6 p.m.  As usual we meet at the IBM Innovation Center at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451.

Join us for our first technology round-table discussion format.  As a group we will examine the scalability platforms and tools we used in 2008.  Do you have questions about the best use of Amazon Web Services?  What are the pros and cons of using an event-based architecture?  Have you got experience using memcached that you’d like to share?  Still unsure of why you’d want to use a data grid like Coherence or WebSphere eXtreme Scale?  This is the meeting you’ve been waiting for if you have these questions or answers to them.  Bring any questions or experience you have to the table and we’ll all come away from the meeting more knowledgeable and capable of building scalable applications.

We will also look ahead at what is to come in 2009.  Will Rails 3.0 be the platform of choice for building scalable apps?  How will Open Source Java projects like Hibernate Shards fair in ‘09?  Does Google AppEngine have what it takes to gain major marketshare?  What will define “Cloud Computing” this year and how will you use it in your projects?  When does it make sense to virtualize your infrastructure?  The scalability round-table is the place to discuss all these things and more.

Bring your opinions, questions and answers to our first round-table meeting and discuss the present and future of scalable applications.  There will be bottled water and snacks at this meeting.  It will be open discussion with moderation if and when required.  Everyone will have a chance to voice their opinions and ask their questions.  We’ll all do our best to give good answers.

This meeting takes place on Wednesday January 28, 2009 at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, MA 02451.  Start time is 6 p.m.  Please register for this meeting if you plan to attend.  Attendance is always free.  If you can not make this meeting but want to find out about future meetings please sign up for our announcement list.

Please send any questions to anthony@bostonsug.org.

Thanks everyone!  Hope to see you on the 28th!

Anthony

Hello everyone,

Right now I’m booking the next three meetings that will take place in January, February and March of 2009.  We’re taking a short break due to the holiday season, but I’ve got plenty of speakers and activities planned for the start of 2009.  Two of the potential speakers are Flickr’s John Allspaw and IBM/XIV’s Aviad Offer.  Additional topics include Right Scale, Microsoft’s Velocity and more.

As always please let me know if you’re interested in presenting or know someone that is interested in presenting.

Stay tuned for more info in the next week.

Anthony

Our next meeting takes place on Wednesday October 22 at 6 p.m. in the IBM Innovation Center.  This month we have Nikita Ivanov, founder of the GridGain project.  There will be pizza at this meeting!  Please register for this meeting if you plan to attend.  Attendance is always free.  If you can not make this meeting but want to find out about future meetings please sign up for our announcement list.

This meeting takes place at the IBM Innovation Center located at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451.  The pizza will arrive at 5:45 p.m. and the meeting starts at 6.  See you on the 22nd!

GridGain 2.0 – Grid Computing Made Simple

Abstract
The topic of this presentation is about fastest growing open source Java grid computing framework called GridGain and how its focus on elegant simplicity and Enterprise Java integration is helping to revolutionize the grid computing for Java in the same way as Spring or JBoss have changed Enterprise Java landscape.

The presentation will start with a brief introduction to grid computing and specifically data and compute grids. MapReduce will be discussed. Real-life examples will be discussed.

Following introduction to grid computing presentation will outline the key features of GridGain 2.0 highlighting simplicity of the usage.

To underscore the topic of presentation it will also include live demonstration of writing a simple application and grid enabling it to run on a small grid right in front of the audience. All coding during demonstration will be done live. Detailed and in-depth explanations will highlight that grid computing in Java can be fun, simple and productive to use in everyday applications and systems.

Outline

• Introduction
• What is Grid Computing?
  • Compute grids (MapReduce)
  • Data grids
• Why is Grid Computing?
• What is GridGain?
• Key Features
  • Advanced MapReduce
  • Zero deployment
  • Automatic fault tolerance
  • SPI-based architecture
  • JMX-based management & monitoring
  • Early and late load balancing
  • Annotation-based grid enabling with AOP
• Live coding demonstration
• Conclusion
• Q&A

Speaker’s Profile
Mr. Ivanov has over 15 years of experience in software development and over 7 years of developing grid computing and distributed middleware, a vision and pragmatic view of where development technology is going, and high quality standards in software engineering.

Back in 1996, Mr. Ivanov was one of the pioneers in using Java technology for server side middleware development while working at T-Systems GmbH, one of the largest European System Integrator.

Mr. Ivanov has held various positions architecting and leading software product development for start-up companies and working with well-established companies such as Adaptec, Visa and BEA Systems. Mr. Ivanov is an active member of Java middleware community and is a contributor to Java specifications as a member of JSR-107.

Mr. Ivanov holds a Master’s degree in Electro Mechanics from Baltic State Technical University, Saint Petersburg, Russia.