Boston Scalability
User Group

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.

In one week BostonSUG meets at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, MA.  This is a great opportunity to see IBM Distinguished Engineer Billy Newport speak about the evolution of what is now known as WebSphere eXtreme Scale.  eXtreme Scale addresses a lot of the “high-X” application requirements.  Billy will talk about how to build applications that provide high availability for datasets, taking advantage of in-memory object grids for high-throughput transaction processing and a lot more.  We’ll also get Billy’s take on cloud computing and how to work with applications and data in the cloud.

We’ll have plenty of pizza and raffles for O’Reilly books.  All the meeting details can be found on the announcement page.  Please register for this meeting if you plan to attend (it helps us order the right amount of food), but you can always attend even if you don’t register.  Best of all, attendance is free!

I hope to see everyone next Wednesday night (September 24, 2008) at 6 p.m. at the IBM Innovation Center.  404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451 (click for map and directions).

If you have any questions please contact me via email. <anthony> <at> <bostonsug> dot <org>

Anthony

Hello everyone,

Our next meeting is Wednesday September 24 at 6 p.m. at the IBM Innovation Center. This month we have Billy Newport coming in from Rochester, MN to talk about IBM Websphere eXtreme Scale, formerly known as Object Grid.

About WebSphere eXtreme Scale
WebSphere eXtreme Scale allows business applications to process massive volumes of transactions with extreme efficiency and linear scalability. WebSphere eXtreme Scale operates as an in-memory data grid that dynamically caches, partitions, replicates, and manages application data and business logic across multiple servers. It provides transactional integrity and transparent failover to ensure high availability, high reliability, and constant response times. WebSphere eXtreme Scale is an essential IBM software technology for conducting extreme transaction processing.

About Billy Newport
Billy Newport is a Distinguished Engineer working on WebSphere XD distributed caching technology (ObjectGrid) and on WebSphere high availability. He’s worked at IBM since Sept 2001. Besides his current activities, he helped add advanced APIs like the WorkManager APIs (JSR 236/237) and worked on the staff plugin architecture of WPS. Prior to IBM, he worked as an independant consultant at a variety of companies in investment banking, telcos, publishing, yellow pages over the previous 13 years in over 10 countries. He graduated from the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland with a Bachelors in Applied Computing in 1989.

We will have all the food and drinks you have come to expect from BostonSUG meetings as well as a couple of book give-a-ways sponsored by O’Reilly.

Please register for this meeting if you plan to attend.  It helps us order the right amount of food.  Of course registration and attendance are always free and you can still come to the meeting even if you don’t register.

If you can’t attend this meeting but want updates about future BostonSUG events you can sign up for our announcement list.

Food arrives at 5:45 and the meeting will begin shortly after 6.

The IBM Innovation Center is located at 404 Wyman St. (North Entrance) Waltham, MA 02451.

See you on Wednesday the 24th at 6 p.m.!

Anthony

This is a reminder that the BostonSUG August meeting takes place *tomorrow night* August 27th at 6 p.m. We meet at the IBM Innovation Center located at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451. As usual there will be pizza and drinks for everyone, sponsored by Akamai.

This month we have two presenters from Akamai Technologies: Tom O’Hare and Rakesh Chaudhary. We will be covering a lot of ground at this meeting, including digital media topics. There is still time to sign up so head to our meeting registration page to reserve your seat (and pizza!). Of course you can always attend even if you do not sign up in advance.

Delivering Highly Scalable Web Sites and Applications

Since 1999, Akamai has built a large-scale distributed system with 30,000+ servers spread across 1000+ networks and 70+ countries. Akamai’s technology-at its core, applied mathematics and algorithms-manages the distribution of large content libraries and intelligently optimizes routes to accelerate dynamic sites and applications. “Cloud Computing” may be the new buzzword in the industry, but Akamai has been managing its service as a cloud since its introduction 10 years ago.

This talk will provide in-depth information about Akamai solutions and technologies, focusing on strategies for scaling your Web infrastructure. In addition, the following topics will also be covered along with best practices with clear examples and real world results.

• A Behind the Scene view of how Caching Works
• Best Practices for Cache settings, HTML and AJAX Configurations for Optimum Site Performance
• Overcoming Performance and Reliability challenges for Dynamic Web and IP Based Enterprise Applications
• Evolution of online video + technology trends
• Overcoming Performance and Scalability challenges in delivering high quality video over the web
• Leveraging Akamai’s Open Developer Toolkit to rapidly build Video Player Applications

Tom O’Hare – Akamai Technologies
Tom O’Hare is a Technical Manager in Global Services and Support at
Akamai. During Tom’s 8 years at Akamai, he’s led customer engagements on
many different types of online content including, dynamic
business-to-business portals, online retail sites, and next generation
social networks.

Rakesh Chaudhary – Akamai Technologies
Rakesh Chaudhary manages Akamai’s Media Solutions Team. Rakesh has spent 7 years at Akamai, architecting scalable fault-tolerant systems for large scale enterprises spanning media & entertainment, sports, b2c portal and telecom industries.

See you tomorrow at 6!

Anthony Chaves

This is just a reminder that our next meeting will be held in just one week on August 27th at 6 p.m. in the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, MA.

This will be a very exciting meeting with two often-requested speakers from Akamai Technologies. Tom O’Hare and Rakesh Chaudhary will present on the following topics:

• A Behind the Scene view of how Caching Works
• Best Practices for Cache settings, HTML and AJAX Configurations for Optimum Site Performance
• Overcoming Performance and Reliability challenges for Dynamic Web and IP Based Enterprise Applications
• Leveraging Akamai’s Open Developer Toolkit to rapidly build Video Player Applications
• Evolution of online video + technology trends
• Overcoming Performance and Scalability challenges in delivering high quality video over the web
• Leveraging Akamai’s Open Developer Toolkit to rapidly build Video Player Applications

There is still plenty of time to sign up for the meeting if you plan to attend.  Signing up for the meeting helps us plan how much food to order.  Of course there will be pizza and drinks at this meeting!  You can sign up at our registration page.  The food will arrive at 5:45 and the meeting will begin at 6.

The IBM Innovation Center is located at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451.

See you next week Wednesday at 6 p.m.!

Anthony

I’ve got great news about our August meeting (which is just two short weeks away on August 27): Akamai member Rakesh Chaudhary will join Tom O’Hare in exploring digital media topics.

Rakesh Chaudhary – Akamai Technologies

Rakesh Chaudhary manages Akamai’s Media Solutions Team. Rakesh has spent 7 years at Akamai, architecting scalable fault-tolerant systems for large scale enterprises spanning media & entertainment, sports, b2c portal and telecom industries.

Topics:
• Evolution of online video + technology trends
• Overcoming Performance and Scalability challenges in delivering high
  quality video over the web
• Leveraging Akamai’s Open Developer Toolkit to rapidly build Video
  Player Applications

This will be an exciting meeting that will cover a lot of ground.  There is still room to register and there will be pizza!  Please head over to the meeting registration page and let us know if you will be attending on Wednesday August 27 at 6 p.m.

We meet at the IBM Innovation Center located at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451.

View Larger Map

See you on the 27th!

Anthony

Hello everyone,

I’m very happy to announce our next meeting will take place on Wednesday August 27 at 6 p.m. in the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, MA.

Delivering Highly Scalable Web Sites and Applications

Since 1999, Akamai has built a large-scale distributed system with
30,000+ servers spread across 1000+ networks and 70+ countries. Akamai’s
technology-at its core, applied mathematics and algorithms-manages the
distribution of large content libraries and intelligently optimizes
routes to accelerate dynamic sites and applications. “Cloud Computing”
may be the new buzzword in the industry, but Akamai has been managing
its service as a cloud since its introduction 10 years ago.

This talk will provide in-depth information about Akamai solutions and
technologies, focusing on strategies for scaling your Web
infrastructure. In addition, the following topics will also be covered
along with best practices with clear examples and real world results.

• A Behind the Scene view of how Caching Works
• Best Practices for Cache settings, HTML and AJAX Configurations for Optimum Site Performance
• Overcoming Performance and Reliability challenges for Dynamic Web and IP Based Enterprise Applications
• Leveraging Akamai’s Open Developer Toolkit to rapidly build Video Player Applications

Tom O’Hare – Akamai Technologies
Tom O’Hare is a Technical Manager in Global Services and Support at
Akamai. During Tom’s 8 years at Akamai, he’s led customer engagements on
many different types of online content including, dynamic
business-to-business portals, online retail sites, and next generation
social networks.

The Akamai Difference
Akamai(r) provides market-leading managed services for powering rich
media, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online. Having
pioneered the content delivery market one decade ago, Akamai’s services
have been adopted by the world’s most recognized brands across diverse
industries. The alternative to centralized Web infrastructure, Akamai’s
global network of tens of thousands of distributed servers provides the
scale, reliability, insight and performance for businesses to succeed
online. An S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 company, Akamai has transformed the
Internet into a more viable place to inform, entertain, interact, and
collaborate. To experience The Akamai Difference, visit www.akamai.com.

There will be pizza and water/soda as usual.  Please register for the meeting to help us order enough!

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

Coming September 24: Billy Newport from IBM to talk about WebSphere eXtreme Scale.  Abstract and announcement coming soon.

The IBM Innovation Center is located at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451.  See you on August 27th!

Anthony

Hi everyone,

This is just a reminder that there will not be a BostonSUG meeting in July.  Get outside and enjoy the nice weather.  We’ll pick up again on August 27.

Also keep in mind that our user group is sponsored by O’Reilly.  This means that members get a discount on all O’Reilly books.  Please email me (see the signature for this post) for our discount code.  We also get free review books.  Let me know if you’d like to write a book review and I’ll get a copy of the book for you.  If you choose a book from the recent releases list you could be the first one to write a review for it!

Is there someone you’d like to see speak at an upcoming BostonSUG meeting?  If so please let me know!  I’ll do my very best to book them for an upcoming meeting.  I’m booking the August, September and October meetings so get your requests in now!

Anthony
- contact – >at< bostonsug |dot| org