This week I was excited to finally attend QCon NY after having read so many tweets from the event in the past years.
I had expected the majority of attendees to be startups, so I was surprised to see many established companies at the event. The conference was divided into several tracks over the course of three days. Of these tracks, the microservices and containers tracks seemed to be the most popular. Many of these sessions were standing room only.
We had good traffic at our booth. Many had not heard of GridGain, so I was happy to have a lot of conversations that allowed me to clarify attendees’ understanding. GridGain adds the enterprise features to the open source, Apache Ignite In-memory Data Fabric . Most people were not familiar with the term “in-memory data fabric” . Some used Redis as a point of reference. As I explained to people that while we certainly can do simple cache operations, that is just a small fraction of what the in-memory data fabric offers.
People were surprised to learn of the many different ways that you can access and transact on data. In particular, Gridgain’s ANSI 99 compliant SQL, which includes distributed joins, and ACID transactions were the biggest surprises. What initially started as a conversation about caches led to discussing some of the other Ignite features, such as, streaming, continuous queries, pub/sub messaging, and our Spark RDD implementation. People could not believe how much functionality is packed into the fabric.
Overall, it was great show, and I hope the conversations I had helped people understand GridGain and consider it for their future use cases.