Boston Scalability
User Group

Hello everyone,

I’m happy to announce the next meeting of the Boston Scalability User Group will take place on Wednesday June 18. This is the third Wednesday in June, not the fourth Wednesday as we normally do. This meeting will take place at the IBM Innovation Center located at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451. Pizza will arrive at 5:45 p.m. and the meeting starts at 6 p.m.

Our guest for the evening is Mike Culver from Amazon! Mike will present “Cloud Dreaming: From Ideas to Innovation”. Read on for more.

Cloud Dreaming: From Ideas to Innovation
It’s amazing when you think about it. Just ten years ago XML was first spec’d out, and XML Web Services were born in 2001 or so. Today the latest buzzword-compliant conversation has dropped “Web 2.0” in favor of “Cloud Computing”, and it seems like every day there is a new announcement about cloud something-or-other.

This talk will look at what’s possible in this new era of Cloud Computing: more specifically it will provide an overview of Amazon Web Services, including a look at what it means to refactor computing as a set of Web services such as data storage in the cloud, on-demand virtualized servers, and a database as a Web service. There will also be a demo showing how to set up a virtual server. But mostly this will be an opportunity to have a discussion about innovation and entrepreneurial tools.

Amazon spent over a decade developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon web sites for millions of customers every day. Most people think “Amazon.com” when they hear the word; however developers are excited to learn that there is a separate technology arm of the company, known as Amazon Web Services or AWS. Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that powers Amazon’s retail business. AWS has now launched ten services with open API’s for developers to build applications, with the result that over 370,000 developers have registered on Amazon’s developer site to create applications based on these services.

About the Speaker
Mike Culver joined the Developer Relations Group of Amazon Web Services in 2006, and brings with him fifteen years of technology leadership experience, including at companies such as Microsoft. In addition Mike has a strong background running an IT organization, with over a decade of experience in the Electrical Wholesale Distribution industry. As a Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, he helps developers take advantage of disruptive technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications, and the way that businesses compete.

As usual there will be plenty of pizza and refreshments at the meeting. Please register so we know how much to order. See you on the 18th!

Anthony

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


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Wednesday’s meeting of the Boston Scalability User Group was a big hit!  I’d like to thank everyone in attendance for coming to talk about computers while the weather outside was beautiful.  We had a great turnout and I noticed a lot of people where talking for quite a while after the meeting, too.  Keep it up, everyone!  I like to see people sharing their stories and experience.

Of course we have to thank our special guest speaker for the evening, Orion Letizi from Terracotta!  Orion flew all the way from San Fransisco to Boston to give a great presentation.  Orion covered a lot of ground in just over two hours he was at the podium.  We got to explore using Terracotta for configuration management, synchronizing actions across JVMs, using distributed shared objects in their locality of reference and much more.  Orion also showed us several demos, including a cool shared editor.  Thanks again for coming such a long way to speak!  And a big thanks to Terracotta for sponsoring the pizza!

Check back soon for the June 18 meeting announcement (this is the 3rd Wednesday not the 4th as we usually do).

(important note: there will be pizza at this meeting!)

Hi everyone,

I’m just popping in to remind everyone about the BostonSUG meeting that takes place next week on Wednesday the 28th of May at 6 p.m. in Waltham’s IBM Innovation Center.  Orion Letizi will host an interactive session about the open-source Terracotta project.  For those that don’t know, Terracotta functions as Network Attached Memory for your JVMs which allows you to work with huge datasets, pool your persistent Hibernate objects, cluster your HTTP sessions and much more.  Using Terracotta in your product can reduce database abuse, ease cluster setup and achieve your uptime goals.  Worried about development impact?  Terracotta implements these features using the APIs that you already know.

All the meeting details (including directions) can be found at the meeting announcement page.  There is plenty of room available at IBM and there will be plenty of pizza available, too! Please register for the meeting if you plan to attend.

Thanks and see you on Wednesday night!

Anthony

Hello everyone,

I’m happy to announce the next meeting of the Boston Scalability User Group will take place on Wednesday May 28 at 6 p.m. We will meet at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, MA.

Orion Letizi from Terracotta will conduct an interactive session exploring the open-source Terracotta project. Terracotta is useful in many different cases including use as Network Attached Memory for working with large datasets, clustering HTTP sessions, reducing database load, acting as a second-level cache for Hibernate objects and more. You can find out more about some of these use cases by visiting the Start Learning Terracotta page.

Orion’s talk starts off with an overview of Terracotta and using cluster visualization tools to diagnose performance problems with an application. After that the presentation becomes a discussion about Terracotta with the audience. No questions are off-limits so you can ask about how it works, how to contribute, find out if it is appropriate for your use-case and more. This is a fun and interesting way to run the meeting because it allows us to ask questions about the project that are important to us. So read up on Terracotta, use it and come to the meeting prepared to ask questions and learn!

Please register for this meeting if you plan to attend. There will be pizza so make sure you register so we know how much to order.

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


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See you on the 28th!

A big thank you to everyone that came to last night’s meeting.  We had a great turnout to see Greg Leake’s presentation on the StockTrader 2.0 app and the Configuration Services.  Greg’s presentation included full demos of the StockTrader interoperability with IBM’s version of the application.  Greg successfully demo’d the fact that a service is a service by running the .NET web front end against the WebSphere business services and the WebSphere web front end against the .NET business services.  He also showed the dynamic clustering and load balancing facilities in StockTrader 2.0 that are easily configured using the Configuration Services included with StockTrader 2.0.  This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg as Greg had a jam-packed two-hour-plus presentation that covered a lot of ground.  We would like to thank Greg for coming all the way to Waltham after his user group tour started in San Fransisco last week!

We would also like to thank Microsoft for hosting the meeting and providing the pizza.  Chris Bowen and Linh Dinh did most of the heavy lifting to arrange this meeting and it was a big success.

Thanks again to everyone that attended last night!  I’m very happy with the level of audience participation and insightful questions that people ask our speakers.  Check back soon for the May meeting announcement.

Hello everyone,

I’m happy to announce our April meeting will take place on Wednesday April 23 at 6 p.m. It’s important to note that our meeting location this month will be at Microsoft in Waltham, MA, a couple exits up from our IBM Innovation Center meeting location.

This month we will have Greg Leake present his new .NET StockTrader 2.0 application. This presentation will focus on building highly scalable applications using the Windows Communication Foundation found in .NET 3.0 and ASP.NET. Other important topics to be discussed are interoperability, particularly with JavaEE applications and SOA. The .NET StockTrader 2.0 application is a service-oriented application. You can find out more about it at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/bb499684.aspx. I highly recommend getting familiar with the technical overview before the meeting as there is a lot of good information in there that directly relates to application scalability.

.NET StockTrader/SOA Session

Subject: The .NET StockTrader is an end-to-end sample application for .NET Enterprise Application Server technologies. It is a distributed service-oriented application based on the .NET Framework, specifically using Windows Communication Foundation and ASP.NET. This session will illustrate how many of the .NET enterprise development technologies are made for building highly scalable, rich “enterprise-connected” applications. Greg will also be doing a full demo of this application and how he has designed this application to be a benchmark kit.

Speaker: Greg Leake works in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. Greg has been at the company for about 15 years and has held several positions including a few in the Developer Division. He currently spends most of his time developing new enterprise software and samples that focus on interoperability, scalability and performance. Go to the link below to find out more about Greg and his work on the .NET Framework.

There will be pizza and drinks this month, sponsored by Microsoft. In order to know about how much food to order please register for this meeting! It’s just like reserving a few slices of pizza for yourself!

Can’t make this meeting but want to find out about future BostonSUG events? Join our announcement list!

Microsoft is located at 201 Jones Rd. Waltham, MA. 02451

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Free Books!

One of the benefits of being a member of BostonSUG is that you can request a free review copy of any O’Reilly book.  One book I’d like to see a BostonSUG member review is James Murty’s Programming Amazon Web Services.  It’s a recent release so if you get it quickly you could be the first one to review it on O’Reilly’s site, Amazon.com or Slashdot.  There has been a lot of talk about Amazon’s web services recently so getting this book and getting a review out there would be a big help to a lot of people (myself included)!

Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll request the book for you.  Once your review is done I’d like to post it on the BostonSUG web site and send it on to O’Reilly and Slashdot.  Don’t want to write a review?  Read on!

Cheap Books!

Another benefit of being a BostonSUG member is that we get a 35% discount on O’Reilly, No Starch, Paraglyph, PC Publishing, Pragmatic Bookshelf, Rocky Nook, SitePoint, or YoungJin products purchased directly from O’Reilly.  Orders can be made online at the O’Reilly Store.

Please contact me for the group discount code or to request a review copy.  [contact]  {at} (bostonsug)dot(org)

Patrick Peralta has provided us with his slides from last week’s meeting.  Thanks Patrick!

Orchestrating Messaging, Data Grid and Database for Scalable Performance

I’d like to thank everyone for making last night’s meeting of BostonSUG a great success!  At our first meeting we had 20 people in attendance to see a great presentation by Patrick Peralta.  Patrick’s presentation certainly opened my eyes to what could be done with a data grid and I was especially interested in learning about the write-behind pattern used to interact with the data store.  We had a great Q&A session where we learned about Oracle’s Coherence product, recommended deployment topology and usage patterns.

Thanks again to everyone that came out and stay tuned for the meeting announcement for our April meeting!

Hello everyone,

Our first meeting will take place on Wednesday March 26 at 6 p.m. in the IBM Innovation Center (Waltham, MA). Our first speaker will be Patrick Peralta of Oracle! Patrick will be presenting:

Orchestrating Messaging, Data Grid and Database for Scalable Performance
Recent years have seen a surge in the number of tools available for building high-scale systems. In the areas of messaging, data grids and databases, many products combine high availability and horizontal “scale-out” across multiple machines. The overlap between these approaches, and the number of possible combinations, raises these questions — “How do I know which combination of technologies to use?” and “How do these technologies work together?”

This presentation compares and contrasts these options, identifying where each technology fits, doesn’t fit, and even when to use a technology that’s not the best fit. We will further explore how to integrate these components while understanding the tradeoffs between performance, scalability and reliability.

Patrick Peralta is a Software Engineer for Oracle, specializing in Coherence. Patrick’s software development experience includes implementing Java/J2EE middle tier solutions, web applications, system integrations, and Swing desktop clients. Prior to joining Oracle, Patrick was a Senior Developer at Symantec, working on J2EE and integration systems. He enjoys mentoring others on technology, and he especially enjoys participating in Open Source. Patrick has a BS in computer science from Stetson University in Florida.

Important Note: There will be pizza at this meeting!

Please register if you would like to attend this meeting.

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

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Please sign up for the BostonSUG announcements list in order to receive more information on this meeting and future events. Remember, meeting attendance is FREE!