After bringing the MongoDB up-to-date a few days ago, this time it’s the turn of the Cloud Cache Store, our JClouds-based store which allows you to use any of the JClouds BlobStore providers to persist your cache data. This includes AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage and Rackspace Cloud Files. In a perfect world this would have been 8.0.0.Final, but Sod’s law rules, so I give you 8.0.1.Final instead :) So head on over to our store download page and try it out.

The actual configuration of the cachestore depends on the provider, so refer to the JClouds documentation. The following is a programmatic example using the "transient" provider:  

And this is how you’d configure it declaratively:

This will work with any Infinispan 8.x release.

Enjoy !

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

Corporate slaves often spend months of paper work only to find their machine obsolete before its powered on.   Forward thinking individuals need playgrounds to try out new ideas.  Enterprise 2.0 projects have to scale with their user base.  In short, there’s a lot of demand for flexible infrastructure.  Cloud infrastructure is one way to fill that order.

One popular cloud infrastructure provider is Amazon EC2.  EC2 is basically a pay-as-you-go datacenter.  You pay for CPU, storage, and network resources.  Using the open-source Infinispan data grid, you have a good chance of linear performance as your application needs change.  Using EC2, you can instantly bring on hosts to support that need.  Great match, right?  What’s next?

Assuming your data is important, you will need to persist your Infinispan cluster somewhere.   That said, Amazon charges you for traffic that goes in and out of their network…​ this could get expensive.  So, the next bit is controlling these costs. 

Amazon offers a storage service called S3.  Transferring data between EC2 and S3 is free; you only pay for data parking.  In short, there is a way to control these I/O costs: S3. 

Infinispan will save your cluster to S3 when configured with its high-performance JClouds plug-in.  You specify the S3 Bucket and your AWS credentials and Infinispan does the rest.

In summary, not only does Infinispan shred your license costs, but we also help cut your persistence costs, too!

So, go ahead: Keep it in the cloud!