Self-service, automatic microservices deployment on any environment with no downtime

The digital transformation journey is leading our customers down a road to optimized development and deployment strategies; a road dominated by trends including cloud, microservices, and automation that provide benefits of simplicity, scalability and agility. This road, however, can indeed be winding with many bumps and roadblocks, especially in the case of hybrid and multicloud, as noted in The Future of Cloud Data Management Is Multicloud where, Gartner states that although the use of more than one cloud for data and analytics is inevitable, data and analytics leaders must prepare for a world, “where data management, governance and integration become more complex than ever before.” This includes the challenge of efficient monitoring, managing and provisioning of resources to ensure performance and availability while optimizing costs.

And although microservices promise the benefits of agility and fast time-to-market, enterprises must be able to smoothly test and deploy new services without management overhead and service disruption.

With these trends and challenges in mind, I am excited to announce today the release of GigaSpaces v15.5 which simplifies and facilitates the adoption of both the hybrid, multi-cloud and microservices, to power modern data and analytics strategies that drive your digital transformation journey. Version 15.5 focuses on 3 main pillars:

1. Realizing the value of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments: automated provisioning across multiple environments, including cloud bursting and self balancing for superior customer experience and optimized cloud spending.
2. Perfecting microservices: easy one-click deployment, schema evolution support that enables A/B testing with Canary and Blue-Green strategies with no downtime in your production environment.
3. Simplified management and operations: one-click connectors for on-prem and cloud RDBMS, and out-of-the-box index usage efficiency metrics to simplify the data modeling process.

Realizing the Value of Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Deployments 

With the availability of version 15.5, GigaSpaces becomes the only in-memory computing vendor that allows you to create a hybrid cluster that is provisioned both on-prem and on a public cloud environment, along with hybrid and multi-cloud environments. 

All data can be distributed within a single cluster, eliminating the need for data replication between clusters. This configuration is ideal for hybrid deployments in the same region.

With ElasticGrid, resources can be provisioned automatically both scaling up and scaling out, with one-click; providing network and security configuration out-of-the-box.

Diagram showing a hybrid on premise multi-cloud cluster configuration

Self Balancing for Transactional AND Analytical Workloads

GigaSpaces clusters now offer automatic self balancing capabilities, to provision the appropriate resources at the time they are needed, to eliminate overprovisioning.

Your infrastructure is always suited to your workload demands.

While other solutions offer either scaling up for transactions (RDBMS) or scaling out for analytics (NoSQL), GigaSpaces automatically scales up AND scales out, with no downtime or performance impact to your application.

Diagram showing horizontal scaling and vertical scaling support for transactional and analytical workloads

This on-line, self-service functionality simplifies and improves data management capabilities resulting in:

• Improved user experience, as increasing loads and peaks will not influence performance
• Optimized costs by avoiding overprovisioning and unnecessary cloud spend
• Reduced IT overhead with automatic management capabilities

Predefined thresholds and rules are defined to either automatically scale or trigger an alert which requires a simple one click approval for scaling. You can select the preferred method.

An example can be an automatic trigger to cloud burst from an on premise deployment to a public cloud when there is a spike in demand and additional capacity is needed.

Auto recovery and auto rollback capabilities make sure you always have a stable and operational environment for your applications.

How to Automatically Scale Up and Out?

Depending on the type of applications deployed, you can choose to scale up or out, and simply manage the resources required, either automatically or in a single click, according to the thresholds defined in the system.

You can automatically scale up or down when using ElasticGrid or Kubernetes; increasing or decreasing RAM and CPU for an active GigaSpaces cluster, without downtime.

You can automatically scale out, when using ElasticGrid, adding or reducing the number of partitions used for an application without downtime. 

Once you have clicked to scale your system, resources are automatically provisioned in a rolling manner, while the system is fully operational as seen below:

Scaling up in progress, with no downtime

Perfecting Microservices

A microservices architecture promotes business agility and provides many benefits, such as improved scalability, faster time-to-market, better data security, and more resilient applications, just to name a few.

However, managing, testing and deploying new and updated microservices can be cumbersome, time consuming and may require downtime. Version 15.5 simplifies microservices management and deployment in 3 main areas:

1. Easy, no code, one-click microservices deployment.
2. Smooth handling of new services and features with schema changes using advanced deployment strategies and A/B testing, including Canary and Blue-Green, for risk-free deployment and no unnecessary downtime.
3. Ability to analyze the system’s performance and health, viewing the memory leveraged by each service and its object types; helping to reduce bottlenecks and ensure optimal customer experience.

Easy, No Code, One-click Microservices Deployment

The below shows you how easy it is to deploy your microservices with Version 15.5.  Just select the relevant resource file, topology, RAM and CPU, and deploy in one-click.

GigaSpaces one-click service deployment

No Service Interruption with Schema Evolution

When creating or updating microservices, it is important that testing and deploying the new versions do not impact the availability of the microservice.

GigaSpaces v15.5 introduces schema evolution which ensures no production downtime – avoiding service interruption. This is accomplished by supporting advanced deployment strategies and A/B testing, including Blue-Green and Canary.

Diagram showing Canary deployment strategy to a subset of servers

Object Analysis for Optimized Performance

The introduction of Object Analysis in version 15.5, helps you analyze the stateful services’ health and performance by determining the memory usage for the service and for its object types. You can analyze the data size at the partition level, to identify cases where a specific partition is overloaded with data that could lead to bottlenecks and impact performance and the customer experience.

Object Analysis View of the service and its object types impact on memory

Simplified Management and Operations

GigaSpaces v15.5 features simplified management and operations tools, to optimize resource management and system performance while reducing management overhead. These include:

Index usage analysis and optimization

Indexes are powerful tools used to accelerate access to data and improve digital application performance. The more indexes you have, the better the performance you’ll enjoy. However, indexes have a footprint which consumes storage. This is especially important for in-memory data platforms, since RAM is an expensive resource. More indexes translate into larger RAM footprint which increases costs. Therefore it is critical to tune index usage in order to balance between cost and performance. Index tuning is an ongoing effort that requires a lot of manual work by DBAs. Index Usage is a new GigaSpaces tool that provides out-of-the-box index usage efficiency metrics to simplify the data modeling process, pinpoint problems, and uncover index optimization opportunities. It shows you:

1. Index size – the memory footprint of the index
2. Relative index usage – the relative percentage of index usage, out of the total number of index hits via reads and queries of applications
3. Index hits trend over time chart (in Grafana)
4. The total number of hits per index chart (in Grafana)

These measures help the cluster admin understand the application index usage behavior and optimize indexes to balance between cost and performance. For example, a change in the application data access pattern might have rendered an index useless, and the index can be removed. Or an index might be used very sporadically while having a significant memory footprint.

Index Usage Statistics in Grafana

One-click connectors for common relational databases

GigaSpaces previously introduced one-click connectors to MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server in v15.2. Now with v15.5 we expand one-click connectors to Oracle and Postgres on premise, as well as to cloud RDBMS Amazon RDS and Azure SQL.

Other data platforms require weeks of manual effort to map hundreds of tables, schemas, data models, indexes and persistence across multiple databases. Then every time a schema changes this manual mapping process has to be revisited and updated.

GigaSpaces one-click database connector automates the data integration process, automatically discovers the data structure and the tables with their properties, as well as the indexes, eliminating human errors that can be associated with manual mapping. It reduces integration efforts from weeks to virtually a single click.

One-click database connect

Summary

Steve Jobs once said “simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains”.

With GigaSpaces Version 15.5, we continue to strive to offer advanced functionality and the many values that are derived from simplicity and ease-of-use in your organization. By smartly  automating provisioning across multiple environments, enabling no code, one click microservices deployment, along with simplified management and operations, you can deploy your innovative applications and services more quickly and efficiently, offer superior customer service and experience, while optimizing cloud spending.

I invite you to move your organization’s mountains with Version 15.5 today.

Additional Links

• Read more about what’s new in release 15.5 on our Documentation Website
• Download Version 15.5 from the GigaSpaces Download Center