As GridGain Systems Solution Architects, Christos Erotocritou and I have helped numerous customers get started with Apache® Ignite™ and GridGain. During this 1-hour webinar, which originally aired on January 25, 2017, we shared answers to the most common questions asked prior to deployment. We also provided guidance that will save you time and make deploying GridGain or Apache Ignite a more enjoyable experience.
Deploying Apache Ignite and GridGain - Top 7 FAQs Agenda
Questions we addressed include:
- What are the architectural best practices for both large and small deployments?
- How many servers / nodes are needed for my use case?
- How can my transactions be ACID compliant and also highly available?
- Which persistent data stores work with Ignite?
- Which APIs can I use with Apache Ignite?
- How can I leverage the compute grid to speed up data operations?
- What is the best choice for my deployment: Apache Ignite, GridGain Professional or GridGain Enterprise Edition?
Deploying Apache Ignite, GridGain Professional or GridGain Enterprise Edition
Let's look at Apache Ignite versus GridGain Professional. Code-wise and feature-wise they are virtually identical. GridGain Professional Edition is a license supported and indemnified version of Apache Ignite. If you choose to go with GridGain Professional, you get the same features as Apache Ignite plus full support and any type of consulting and patches to the software. So you’re not waiting for the community to patch any bugs or to add new features. You work directly with GridGain and our engineering and support staff.
That includes the Data Grid, which we talked about a little earlier as being the ability to cache data from an existing persistent store. Or just in general to speed up data access. The Compute Grid, which gives you high performance computing capability and the ability to distribute application and workloads across an entire Ignite cluster.
On top of those components there are many different use cases and features and APIs that we’ve developed around them. Including caching for OLTP and OLAP workloads. What I like to call GaaS, or Grid As a Service is a use case for which a number of our clients actually are using Ignite throughout their organization. What they’ve done is they created a wrapper that for any time anybody needs an in-memory application of some sort that they will just access that one particular cluster. So it’s a multi-tenant application internally within an organization
There’s the Service and Messaging Grid. Then also streaming and CEP. Full APIs to allow for only once or guaranteed message delivery of individual streaming messages. And integrations with any type of streaming application.
The features that are in GridGain Enterprise are centered around security, high-availability and monitoring and management.
Within Ignite, you can encrypt data in flight between the nodes. But GridGain Enterprise provides you the ability to integrate with authentication and authorization components like LDAP and Kerberos. It also provides full auditing capabilities. We have clients that have created PCI compliant applications around GridGain Enterprise. The security features provide you those capabilities.
Regarding high-availability. Apache Ignite allows you to create primary and backup nodes within a cluster. If you wanted to do a multi-data center replication, active, active-passive, synchronous or asynchronous replication are available in GridGain Enterprise. Plus rolling upgrades to enable upgrades to clusters without any downtime. Additional features in GridGain Enterprise include network segmentation detection and remediation, plus prevention of split-brain conditions.
GridGain Enterprise also comes with a complete monitoring and management solution. There are two currently available. One called Visor, which is a Java application. The preferred monitoring and management solution is web console. If you’re interested in trying out the web console we have a demo available on the GridGain.com website and I definitely encourage you to check that out.