The second meetup that I attended on my trip to Washington DC was held on Tuesday 3 April at Pariveda Solutions, 11th Floor, 1616 Fort Myer Drive, Arlington, Virginia.
I was again assisted by my colleague Chris Cook. This time, meetup attendance was lower than the event held on the previous day, but the audience was very interactive and asking questions throughout my presentation.
Pariveda Solutions is a consulting firm founded in 2003 with offices across the United States. The meetup presentation was split between myself and Sunny Cheng. Sunny is a Senior Developer at Pariveda and has been evaluating Apache Ignite.
I began the meetup with a brief introduction of my background, work experience and the role that GridGain hired me for. Then I quickly dove into the main presentation.
I started the main Ignite presentation by describing the key features of Ignite, which can be summarized as follows:
the in-memory computing platform
that is durable, strongly consistent and highly available
with powerful SQL, key-value and processing APIs
Next, I added further details using a high-level architectural diagram that showed some of the major components of Ignite, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Apache Ignite
I then briefly showed a slide with some of the vertical application areas and companies using Ignite. This information is also available on the Apache Ignite web site.
In quick succession, I presented slides describing Ignite’s durable memory architecture, data grid, distributed SQL, and compute grid.
The audience was interactive and asked great questions about some of these features. For example, we discussed the read-through and write-through capability with 3rd party storage. In particular, Ignite’s ability to maintain data consistency across both a cache and 3rd party storage. We also discussed transactions support, both optimistic and pessimistic, and how Ignite manages deadlocks.
To wrap-up the presentation, I briefly showed some of the example programs available with the binary distribution of Ignite and how easy it was to launch Ignite nodes directly within an IDE and run some of the example code.
Next up was Sunny and he quickly shared some of his findings from his research and investigation into Apache Ignite. He also showed an example architecture where Ignite’s capabilities could be utilized for read-through and write-through. Summarizing, Sunny was positive about Ignite and its potential for the proposed architecture.
In summary, another good audience with great interaction. Plenty of Pizza also available at the meetup, sponsored by GridGain.