GigaSpaces

History

GigaSpaces was founded in 2000 by Nati Shalom, the company's CTO, who is also a co-founder member of the Israeli Grid consortium, the Israeli non-profit organization focused on grid computing, virtualization, and cloud computing technology.

GigaSpaces initially focused on the data scaling industry with its XAP products that provide distributed computing for extreme transaction processing, and in February 2012, an additional open source platform as a service called Cloudify, a cloud computing technology was made generally available.

Products and technology

When established, GigaSpaces focused on application platforms for Java, and .NET environments based on the software architecture pattern "space-based architecture", borrowing concepts from the Jini and JavaSpaces specifications, providing linear Scalability for stateful, high-performance applications using the Tuple space paradigm. This approach enables scalability while retaining data and logic consistency, latency, and the application code. This approach was developed to solve the scalability barriers present in tier-based applications.

XAP

GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP), is a distributed in-memory data-grid suited for high performance and low-latency transaction processing as well as real-time analytics use cases. XAP performance is achieved by maximizing the utilization of RAM and SSD as the main data store. It is commonly used to speed up existing database performance and scalability and include built-in synchronization with RDBS such as MySQL as well as new databases such as MongoDB, Cassandra etc. XAP was designed to serve as the system of record for the data that it maintains. Therefore, it supports all the features of databases such as complex queries, transaction support etc. Among its main features is support for a wide range of data models starting from a simple key,value API to advance aggregation, Object Graph and SQL support.

Flash provides a high speed data store device. XAP uses a combination of RAM and Flash to handle both speed and cost requirements. The Flash support is known as XAP MemoryXtend and it provides 50x more capacity than pure RAM for the same amount of machines.

Memcache is used as a side cache for read mostly scenarios and as such it provides very limited query support, high availability, transaction support etc. XAP is used to speed up read and write operations and as such it serves as the system of record. XAP provides all the functionality expected from any database including transactional support.

Most of the new NoSQL solutions are used as an alternative database to traditional RDBMS. NoSQL databases use a combination of eventual consistency and scale-out model to handle their scalability and performance. XAP on the other hand was designed to address the existing database scalability and performance by fronting the database with in-memory data-store. The in-memory data-store provides high speed data access to the portion of the data that needs it. It includes built-in synchronization with both NoSQL and RDBMS type of databases to load the data upon recovery and keep the database in sync when the data gets updated. From an architecture perspective there is a lot of similarities between XAP and other NoSQL databases. Both use a scale-out model to handle its scalability. Unlike NoSQL, XAP uses highly consistent and transactional data access and therefore can serve as a high-speed transactional front-end to NoSQL backend databases.

These days XAP is used for complex event processing and real-time business intelligence for big data. With XAP you can replicate data to a Relational database or non-relational NoSQL database, enabling data replication across remote sites over WAN, for Disaster recovery, and is also cloud-ready.

Cloudify

Cloudify is an open source, cloud computing platform as a service started February 2012 by GigaSpaces Technologies Inc. Cloudify takes advantage of underlying infrastructure or IaaS through a recipe-based model to enable the deployment of any application onto any cloud without having to change the application’s code or architecture. The recipe provides the execution plans for installing, starting, orchestrating, and monitoring an application stack. GigaSpaces has also been an active participant in other open source projects, such as the Compass Project.

Cloudify adjusts server usage according to demand using load balancing middleware. Cloudify applies DevOps principle, describing each aspect of the production environment as code or configuration.

Cloudify was designed, to a large degree, on the lessons of our earlier generation PaaS solution. In our earlier generation solution, we took a cautious decision to bind it specifically to Amazon and chose Java as the primary language of choice. A lot of that had to do with the maturity of the cloud market at the time, and the availability of tools and frameworks. Since then, there has been a very rapid advancement on almost every front which changed the entire landscape.

Starting from Cloudify 2.2, Cloudify supports the Chef technology to deploy and configure application services. Chef provides a multi-platform framework for configuring operating systems and services. It complements Cloudify recipes by handling the scope of intra-machine configurations. Using Chef, the lifecycle of services can be simplified as Chef takes care of keeping service configurations up-to-date with current specifications as defined by roles and cookbooks.

Cloudify has partnered with IBM InfoSphere BigInsights. Cloudify enables BigInsights to run consistently with additional big data services such as NoSQL databases and more; simplifying these systems' deployments through consistent management, as well as improving cost efficiency with its cloud enablement & portability support. Cloudify's consistent management refers specifically to consistent deployment, configuration, and management across the stack, which applies not only to the deployment phase, but also to post-deployment, including failover, scaling, and upgrades - which are all accomplished through Cloudify's built-in recipe mechanism.

Awards and recognition

GigaSpaces Technologies, has been recognized by the industry for its technology contributions several times, including: third place for the Deloitte Fast 50 award in 2008, finalists in VentureBeat's CloudBeat Showdown 2011, the CRN 20 Coolest Cloud Platforms & Development Vendors 2012, the Red Herring Top 100 Europe 2012, as well as the 2012 SD Times 100: A Software Development Superfecta as a cloud leader.