Berlin and Stuttgart say hello to Infinispan

Last week I finally put together my presentation on cloud computing and Infinispan. To kick things off, I presented it at two JUG events in Germany.

Berlin’s Brandenburg JUG organised an event at the NewThinking Store in Berlin’s trendy Mitte district. Thanks to Tobias Hartwig and Ralph Bergmann for organising the event, which drew an audience of about 35 people. Cloud computing was the focus of the evening, and I started the event with my rather lengthy presentation on cloud computing and specific issues around persisting data in a cloud. The bulk of the presentation focused on Infinispan, what it provides as a data grid platform, and what’s on the roadmap. After a demo and a short break, Infinispan committer Adrian Cole then spoke about JClouds, demonstrating Infinispan’s use of JClouds to back cached state onto Amazon’s S3. You can read more about Adrian’s presentation on his blog.

Two days later, the Stuttgart JUG arranged for me to speak to their JBoss Special Interest Group on Infinispan. Thanks to Tobias Frech and Heiko Rupp for organising this event, which was held in one of Red Hat’s training rooms in Stuttgart. The presentation followed a similar pattern to what was presented in Berlin, to an audience of about 15 people.

In both cases, there was an overwhelming interest in Infinispan as a distributed storage engine. The JPA interface which is on our roadmap generated a lot of interest, as did the query API and to a lesser extent the asynchronous API - which could benefit from a better example in my presentation to demonstrate why this really is a powerful thing.

Overall, it is good to see that folks are interested in and are aware of the challenges involved in data storage on clouds, where traditional database usage is less relevant.

Many people have asked me for downloadable versions of my slides. Rest assured I will put them up - either as PDFs or better still, as a podcast - over the next 2 weeks.

Coming up, I will be in Krakow speaking at their JUG on Thursday the 23rd, and then in Dublin on Tuesday the 29th. Details of these two events are on the Infinispan Talks Calendar. Hope to see you there!

Cheers Manik