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Cloud workshop: Gigaspaces XAP with Joyent Accelerators

Joyent blogger writes:

Cloud Computing is the act of deploying, elastically scaling, managing, and running Cloud Computing Applications on Cloud Computers. Cloud Computing Applications are those applications that are well designed to run on Cloud Computers. In this case, Joyent provided infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Gigaspaces provided the Gigaspaces XAP Platform as a Service (PaaS). A savvy developer, Owen, created a cloud computing software application, the Monte Carlo simulation. We definitely did some Cloud Computing in this test!

In emerging from the Joyent Labs program we now know that Gigaspaces XAP is proven to run and scale on Joyent Accelerators. We also showed during the tests that the sun Java stack is particularly powerful because JVM’s can scale vertically well beyond the 2 GiB limitations some other platforms may encounter. For memory hungry applications this can be very useful. In our tests we hit the limits of the 4 GiB accelerators. But, we could have easily scaled vertically by adding more RAM and CPU to the 8, 16, or 32 GiB Acclerator quickly or scaled horizontally by simply adding more Gigaspaces XAP enabled Accelerators and GSC instances.

At one point, we wanted a little more horsepower for the application. So, in a total of about 10 minutes I setup the Gigaspaces application on a new node I had handy and turned it over to Owen who very quickly configured his application and brought up the new nodes for more capacity during the test.

Some other exciting things about this exercise in the lab was that it was, in general, easy. We added and removed nodes, scaled linearly, pulled nodes out, re-deployed the application in seconds to minutes, we processed large amounts of data, and we did all this in the cloud with really minimal efforts.

There is much more to the story, but I want to keep this blog post under 20 pages. I look forward to continuing to work with the Gigaspaces team and exploring the many very interesting possibilities this work presents.


Joyent Blog

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