Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Monday December 04, 2006

Contemporary web architectures and Cool Stack

Since Marc outted the work I've been doing with our PAE and MDE folks, I guess I'd better type up some thoughts on the goings-on. It's time to get some of it out in the wild afterall.

Steve's new group, which I'm happy to be a part of, is off focused on helping Sun's Web Infrastructure customers. What does that mean? As many people have no doubt noticed, there's a new up-and-coming bevy of companies building out new products. Many of these are very consumer and social networking oriented, and others are just new takes on old ideas in a way that makes things more interactive and useful for the consumer of the product and/or service. Most readers of this blog probably are familiar with all of that and associate it with that currently buzz-laden term Web 2.0.

Brief sidebar: I've now been involved in and/or seen a few conferences where people have gone off and attempted to define Web 3.0. As an industry, we sometimes seem to be way more interested in going out and defining new things instead of completing or building out what we've just defined...

Sun's been working with many of these companies long term and has also been working with various startups as they come up. In the process, we've seen there are a few patterns that come up again and again. Sometimes, this is as straightforward as many people using memcached when scaling their PHP environment, but the pattern emerges when you start to see the Java world using things like JavaSpaces and Tangosol in their web application architectures.

So our goal? To help these people get the most of their web infrastructure, be it through scaling, consolidating or just applying a common pattern toward achieving their goals.

Okay, that sounds pretty lofty, so how are we doing that today? Well, we have a couple of compelling things in Solaris and some compelling things in our hardware. Specifically, if you could, for instance, have many, many threads running on the same cache of data with a T1000/T2000 at the same time you're reducing your datacenter footprint and power consumption dramatically, that would bring a benefit to some of these architectures. Another way to bring a benefit to these architectures could be to co-locate inexpensive, low power consuming, highly-reliable (through software) storage with core components of your application with the x4500. Therefore, we've been working with these customers on applying those patterns with whatever hardware/software is appropriate for the environment. Sometimes it'll be memcached, sometimes it will be lighttpd. Other times it will be the AMP stack, in this case embodied through Cool Stack.

Speaking of Cool Stack, the deployment oriented, performance optimized AMP stack for Solaris, there are some good things coming and we'd be interested in what you're interested in. Please either post a comment, post a blog with a trackback, or drop me an email. Of course, the latter of the three is a decidedly Web 1.0 approach. :)

I will be blogging more on the specifics in the not-too-distant future.

Technorati tags: memcached, lighttpd, Web 2.0, ZFS, OpenSolaris