Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...: Arun Gupta's Weblog

Thursday November 05, 2009

Java EE 6 & GlassFish v3 swimming to Amsterdam - JFall 2009

JFall is the annual conference of NL JUG - the 11 year old JUG of Netherlands. This year its happening on Nov 11 at SPANT!

I'll be speaking on Java EE 6 & GlassFish v3 (14:20 - 15:10) there and have lots of cool demos to show through out the talk. And also stay tuned for a brand new demo that shows JavaFX and GlassFish v3 integration.

With over 1000 attendees, the conference is already sold out so if you have not registered yet then you have to wait until next year :)

Here is the list of several Sun sessions:

Here are the sessions that I'd like to attend:

9:00 0 -9:15: Opening
9:15 - 10:00: Keynote - Enterprise 2.0: New Technologies, Innovations and Communities
10:25-11:15
- Migrating your Java EE 5 applications to Java EE 6
- Writing Asynchronous Web Application (Comet) using the Atmosphere Framework
11:20 - 12:10 Scaling Out with Hadoop and NoSql
14:20 - 15:10: Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3: Paving the path for future (of course this one :)
15:45 - 16:35:
- The future of Enterprise Dependency Injection - JSR 299
- JDK7: What's In and What's Not
16:40 - 17:30:
- Eclipse e4: a new beginning
- Java and JavaFX Technology and the Nintendo Wiimote: Just How Much Fun Can You Have?

Most of the sessions are in Dutch so may have to fall back on English speaking sessions :(

Here are some quick data points ...

Complete list of sessions and schedule
Archive of previous conferences: JFall 2004, JFall 2005, JFall 2006, JFall 2007, JFall 2008
Archive of all NL JUG Events

Also trying to arrange a slot in the local Amsterdam Ruby Meetup to talk about JRuby/Rails/GlassFish, lets see if it works out. Otherwise we might somewhere in the hotel lobby :)

And as always, I'm looking for running trails in Amsterdam & Bussum. Any body interested in running together ?

Technorati: glassfish v3 javaee javafx sun amsterdam nljug jfall ams.rb meetup

Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[0]

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Tuesday November 03, 2009

Right Scale User Meetup Trip Report

With a variety of public cloud hosting solutions available in the market such as Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid and private solutions like Eucalyptus, Terremark, and VMWare, Right Scale offers a cloud management platform that operates on most of them. Using Right Scale's platform, you don't need to write scripts to launch EC2 instances, or think about plugging your own monitoring / management mechanisms for health check, or worry about lock-in to a particular cloud provider. Ease-of-use and a faster on-ramp for going production on a cloud are other key reasons amongst several other benefits offered by Right Scale.

Right Scale's mantra "Real customers, Real deployments, Real benefits" was truly evident in their first ever user meetup. Other than discussing the trends, product road map and services offered by Right Scale, the most interesting part was the customer testimonials.

Greg Taylor from Sony Music uses Right Scale to manage it's artists fan sites. Their main reasons for using Right Scale are largest choice of Operating System & AMI, multiple redundant data center reduce risk, and server templates/scripts versioning into portal. They are very happy with MySQL master/slave configuration server templates and have been able to scale to millions of users in a day (e.g. with michaeljackson.com). Michael Dosik from FanSnap (ticket search engine) leverage RightScale for automation instead of adding staff. Auto-scaling, RightScripts, Dashboard/monitoring and ease-of-use are other features specific that brings them to RightScale. Sam Ramji from Sonoa Systems (visibility, management, and control for Cloud services) talked about cutting down their configuration time from 3-4 days on EC2 to hours on RightScale platform and reduced concerns around portability as the main reasons for picking this platform. Read a more complete report about the meetup here.

Here are some other data points ...

Scalable Web Sites, Test & Dev, Business Intelligence, Backup & Recovery, Mobile Services, and Grid Computing are the highest usage areas by Right Scale users
Fast on-ramp, Ease of setup, Ease of maintenance, IT visibility & control, Retain best practices, Productivity, Agility, Reliability, Predictability, and Portability are are some of the key benefits to Right Scale users.
100% production usage on EC2 for now
Ubuntu 9.10, CentOS 5.4, Windows 2003, Windows 2008 support coming (Ubuntu 8.04 used internally)
RHEL is the most often requested platform
Chef integration is the future direction, most new features like Machine Tags are targeted at Chef only
Right Scale's CEO recommended to use the free version for 2 servers and the commercial version for 6-8+ servers
Monitoring features: monit integration, CPU/Disk/Network/MySQL/Apache/others, Auto-scaling based on alerts, 7-day free monitoring

The meetup very much lived to it's promise of "NO! HYPE" buttons which were distributed to all the attendees. Each attendee was given a tee-shirt which had "707,007+" printed in big letters in the front. This is the number of servers launched by Right Scale so far. The "NO! HYPE" promise became much more evident after attending some sessions at SYS-CON Cloud Computing Expo which were still talking about philosophies / theories. The cocktail party in the evening provided a great atmosphere to mingle with the folks behind Right Scale.

So far no pictures from the meetup are available on flickr but hopefully they will show up here.

Over all, I really enjoyed the presentations at the meetup, meeting the Right Scale folks, and food/drinks at the cocktail party :-)

Technorati: rightscale cloud meetup

Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[0]

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