The GigaSpaces Platform as a Service solution, based on GigaSpaces XAP and tight integration with Amazon EC2’s robust infrastructure, is the most comprehensive cloud platform for the enterprise. Like other solutions on the market, it allows you easily build web applications and benefit from the elasticity and scalability of the cloud. Unlike other solutions, it allows you to easily migrate existing enterprise applications, and offers everything you’ve come to expect from enterprise middleware – a familiar development environment, support for major frameworks and languages, solid support for data storage and management, and the resilience and robustness trusted by GigaSpaces’ Fortune 100 customers. XAP is also proven to save your organization money by optimizing cloud usage, making it easy to build a business case for the solution within your organization.

In this page: Platform as a Service Features | Only XAP Provides… | Save More With XAP

Platform as a Service Features

Click the headings below to learn about the GigaSpaces Platform as a Service features and capabilities.

• Rich Enterprise Cloud Services Based on GigaSpaces XAP
• The GigaSpaces PaaS solution is based on GigaSpaces XAP, a high-end application server which builds on years of experience with the most demanding enterprise applications, as well as on the lessons learned from a new generation of Internet services such as Google, Amazon and Twitter. GigaSpaces XAP provides a rich set of enterprise-grade cloud services, all on a single platform, all working out-of-the-box, with no need to shop around for point solutions and figure out how to glue them together:
  • Fine-grained multi-tenancy – XAP offers the following hierarchy of “tenants” on the cloud infrastructure: Billing Account > Sub-Users > Applications > Application Services > Instances. XAP is able to run several instances on one EC2 machine. This means applications belonging to different users can be fragmented across different machines, with complete isolation for individual application services and for application data.
  • Automatic scalability – scales automatically on the EC2 infrastructure, with dynamic resource allocation based on application loads and predefined service levels (no need for additional Amazon products).
  • Data grid services – XAP provides the full functionality of its leading In-Memory Data Grid solution, on the cloud. This gives you very fast data access, event handling, consistency and transactional security, high availability and unlimited scalability for any data volume.
  • Messaging and remoting – XAP can be used by your applications as a messaging server, and can be used to invoke remote services on the cloud.
  • Map/Reduce, parallel processing, and other advanced patterns (no need for additional Amazon products).
  • Comprehensive admin and monitoring tools – XAP offers the most comprehensive cloud tools in the industry, including web-based deployment console, admin API, remote desktop support and CLI client support (read more below).
  • Built-in security – you can setup security for your application, including authentication and SSH connection for web applications, using simple configuration parameters.

    Additional platform features include:

    • One-click deployment – deploy an end-to-end web application, including load-balancer, web container, In-Memory Data Grid and database, in less than 5 minutes! To make this work, XAP lets you control the order in which machines are started (e.g. database first), and makes it possible for machines to discover each other using logical names.
    • Policy-based resource provisioning – you define the service levels for each application and XAP automatically allocates sufficient EC2 resources to meet them.
    • Dynamic machine image support – you can install any software into your machine image instances, on-the-fly, using a simple XML setup.
    • Built-in database integration support – you can launch a database machine, control its initialization setup, and assign a storage disk, all through simple configuration.
    • Built-in load-balancer support – you can setup a load-balancer machine through simple configuration. The load-balancer detects available web containers and automatically sets up load balancing between all available containers.
    • Easy debugging and troubleshooting – view the logging output of each EC2 machine in your web browser.
    • Test applications on your local machine and deploy as-is on the cloud.
    • Transaction support – XAP offers the most comprehensive transaction support in the industry, including two-phase commit, local transactions, Spring declarative transactions, and transaction isolation levels for improved performance.
    • Full support for all Amazon EC2 products – you may use any of Amazon’s added-value platform services in combination with XAP, or instead of any of XAP’s functionality.

• Runs on Amazon EC2 with Tight Integration
• GigaSpaces XAP’s Platform as a Service runs on Amazon EC2’s robust infrastructure, leveraging EC2’s massive scale, multiple locations, reliability and security.
  • Tightly integrated, fully transparent – no need to deal with EC2 machine images, instance allocation, and so on – all of these are handled transparently by the platform. Nevertheless, XAP provides advanced users complete control over the infrastructure, allowing you to setup your own Amazon security group, select availability zones, define machine elastic IP, switch data centers (US / Europe), setup database storage (EBS), and configure your machine environment through a simple XML file, without the need to call APIs.
  • Fully integrated billing – customers pay GigaSpaces directly for the platform and the underlying infrastructure. Amazon fees are charged as a separate item at Amazon’s affordable rates.
  • Comprehensive infrastructure monitoring – although XAP makes the infrastructure transparent, it nevertheless allows you to monitor all the physical hosts, their utilization and the current deployment topology of your applications.

• Enterprise-Grade Robustness and Resilience
• The GigaSpaces Platform as a Service solution is based on GigaSpaces XAP, a mature, enterprise-grade solution.
  • 7th-generation code base known for its stability and robustness, with hundreds of enterprise installations in demanding industries like financial services, telecom, defense and manufacturing.
  • Used in production by Fortune 100 companies for the most demanding, mission-critical applications, both on and off the cloud.
  • 24/7 support by senior GigaSpaces engineers (available for an additional fee).
  • No single point of failure – XAP has no centralized component, so software or hardware failure of any part of the cluster will not affect your application’s availability.
  • Everything is backed up – XAP ensures there is always more than one copy of all data on more than one EC2 machine.
  • Flexible persistence to database – XAP allows you to commit all transactions to the database, and provides a unique model for doing this with no performance impact, ensuring 100% reliability and consistency.
  • Sub-second hot failover – when a machine experiences software/hardware failure, sessions are instantly routed to identical backup with no service interruption.
  • Self healing – when failover to backup occurs, XAP automatically creates new backups on other EC2 machines.
  • Built-in security for XAP administration functions and for your data, including authentication and SSH connection for web applications.

• Native Support for Java EE Web Applications, Spring, Jetty and Glassfish
• The GigaSpaces Platform as a Service solution is based on GigaSpaces XAP, which is well-known for its support and tight integration with major standards and frameworks, allowing you to leverage existing skills to develop for the cloud.
  • Native support for Java and C++ – full interoperability with no performance impact, .NET support coming soon.
  • Native support for Java EE web applications
  • Supports major open frameworks – Spring Framework, Jetty, Glassfish, Mule, Groovy.
  • Use existing development tools such as Eclipse, Ant and Maven.
  • Develop and test on the local machine, deploy as-is on the cloud.

• Seamless Portability for Existing Applications
• The GigaSpaces Platform as a Service solution is based on GigaSpaces XAP, which powers hundreds of applications in on-premise data centers. The exact same platform is provided for your use on the cloud. This means that as soon as your applications are running in XAP, they can be moved between the cloud and on-premise infrastructure in seconds, with no migration effort whatsoever.
  
  
  • Deploy existing applications on the cloud with no changes to code or configuration. Java EE web applications can run on the cloud with zero migration effort.
  • Freedom to deploy on or off the cloud – with XAP applications can be instantly moved between your on-premise data center and the cloud, with no changes to code or configuration.
  • Future proofing for the cloud – with XAP, everything you develop, even if it is not intended to run on the cloud today, will be able to run on the cloud next year or the year after that with no additional investment.

• Guaranteed High Performance
• The GigaSpaces Platform as a Service solution is based on GigaSpaces XAP, which is used by the world’s fastest and most demanding applications, including trade processing at leading stock exchanges, real-time currency trading and online gaming. It is able to provide the most extreme performance, and can also deliver ordinary performance requirements with much less cloud resources and guaranteed response times.
  • Guaranteed resource allocation – XAP always ensures your application always has sufficient hardware resources to deliver the minimal response time you define. Your response time will not depend on how busy the infrastructure is at any point in time.
  • Dynamic scaling guarantees performance under any load – even under unpredictable peak loads, XAP automatically scale your application across more EC2 machines, to guarantee your minimal response time.
  • Benchmark as a Service – XAP makes it easy to perform large-scale benchmarks and performance testing of your cloud-based applications, while simulating extreme scaling and load scenarios that aren’t possible in traditional testing environments. XAP even enables benchmarking and testing on the cloud for applications that are intended to run on-premises.
  • Fastest data access – XAP comes with cutting-edge In-Memory Data Grid technology that provides the lowest possible data latency, even for very high throughputs and data volumes, both on and off the cloud.
  • No network hops – XAP deploys all middleware services in one lightweight container together with your application. This means there are no network hops between different middleware component, resulting in much better performance.

• Comprehensive Administration and Monitoring Tools
• The GigaSpaces Platform as a Service solution provides the most comprehensive management and monitoring tools in the industry.
  • Built-in remote desktop support – you can open a complete desktop client to any machine directly from the browser without needing to configure or setup SSH configuration or install any client application.
  • Command line (CLI) client support – you can deploy a new application from the command line. This makes it easy to embed the Platform as a Service into existing development and deployment environments.
  • Deployment web console – allows you to upload existing applications for deployment on the cloud.
  • Built-in infrastructure monitoring tools – automatically monitors all your cloud applications and shows memory, CPU, bandwidth and storage utilization.
  • GigaSpaces XAP Management Center – complete control over all platform features, middleware components deployed on the cloud, and cluster topologies.
  • Administration API – fine-grained programmatic control over any element in the cloud deployment, with the ability to get system information directly from within your application.

Only XAP Provides...

The GigaSpaces Platform as a Service solution is the only enterprise-grade PaaS on the market today. It is based on GigaSpaces XAP, which leverages years of experience in high-performance distributed computing for the enterprise. Whether you compare it to existing market offerings or to any home-grown platform, it provides the following unique benefits: 

Seamless application portability – seamlessly deploy existing applications on the cloud, develop using common enterprise technologies such as Java EE, C++, Spring, Jetty and Glassfish.

End-to-end scalability for today’s enterprise applications – a single platform providing all the patterns and facilities required by demanding enterprise applications, incorporating lessons learned from new Internet services like as Google and Twitter.

Automatic scaling with guaranteed response times – not only scales your applications but also makes sure that they always deliver a minimal response time; built-in optimization for maximum utilization of multi-core processors.

Always on platform – based on a robust, battle-tested product which powers mission-critical applications at Fortune 100 companies such as Dow Jones. Comes with advanced high availability features that keep applications alive under extreme circumstances.

Extreme performance with no compromises – core engine used by the world’s fastest applications, such as trade processing at leading stock exchanges, to deliver top performance on the cloud without sacrificing consistency and availability.

Want to see for yourself? Get a free trial.

Save More With XAP

The GigaSpaces Platform as a Service solution, based on GigaSpaces XAP, saves you money by optimizing cloud usage, allowing you to pay less on the cloud. This makes it easy to build a business case for the solution within your organization. We also offer a no-risk free trial with 20 Amazon EC2 machine hours (small instance).

• Use less machine hours – with XAP you can reach 5-10 times the performance of standard implementations. This means you can deliver the same performance with less hardware. On the cloud, this translates into an immediate cost saving – by using less resources, you can save as much as 80-90% of the machine hours required per month.
• Use less bandwidth and storage – XAP uses its In-Memory Data Grid to keep your data in-memory, ensuring resiliency and consistency, which saves the need to purchase disk-based storage from the cloud vendor. XAP also runs your business logic collocated with your data, reducing the network bandwidth you’ll need to pay for.
• Run apps only when actually needed – XAP provides complete application lifecycle management, including automated deployment and cleanup (shutdown) of all application instances and middleware (load balancer, web container, database). This enables you to run applications and middleware only as long as it is actually needed. This results in substantial savings of machine hours on the cloud, especially in demo, testing and prototyping scenarios.
• No need to use the cloud for ongoing development – XAP lets you develop locally using an identical environment to the one running on the cloud. This means that ordinary development and testing does not require purchasing cloud machine hours.
• No need for additional cloud products such as Amazon’s map/reduce, parallel processing, automatic scaling and monitoring, SQS, SimpleDB, and loadbalancer, because XAP provides all these service out-of-the-box, included in its basic price.
• Test on the cloud and save in-house testing servers – XAP provides an identical environment for your applications both on and off the cloud, allowing you to test reliably on the cloud and then deploy applications in your local data center. Moving your testing environment to the cloud allows you to eliminate or re-purpose servers dedicated to testing, often more than 1/3 of the servers in a data center.
• Eliminate platform development costs – with most cloud solutions available today, you will need to develop some middleware/platform capabilities needed by enterprise applications. This is not only time-consuming and risky, but also requires special distributed computing skills. XAP saves you the time and trouble of building platform features yourself, by providing a comprehensive enterprise solution.