Saving Money on Inter-Cloud Communication with GridGain

As you probably may have already read, GridGain 3.0 will come with TCP discovery which in turn will support discovery of different cluster groups. For example, you can have your EC2 Cloud belong to one network group and your boxes on your local network belong to another, and all nodes in both groups will discover each other automatically even though there is no direct connectivity between some of them. So, from user stand point, you get a view on the whole grid without worrying about underlying groups or connectivity constraints. However, here is another advantage of such network topology that I have not mentioned before - it saves you money.

Let's say you have Group1 running on in your local network and Group2 running on EC2 cloud. The way GridGain implements it, there would be at least one network tunnel open between one hub node H1 in Group1 and at least one hub node H2 in Group2 (there can be more tunnels for redundancy). So, all the communication that goes from any node in Group1 to any node in Group2 would have to go through this tunnel, essentially from hub H1 to hub H2 or vice versa.

So, imagine now that you have a node N1 in Group1 sending a message to all the nodes in cloud Group2. With standard clustering approach, node N1 would have to have a physical connection with all nodes in Group2. This would mean that the same message would have to be send to each node in Group2. As in cloud environments you pay for external traffic, and this traffic is external, if you have M number of nodes in cloud Group2, you would have to pay M times for the same message. However, in GridGain approach, the message path would be as following:

N1 -> H1 -> H2 -> Group2.

This means that there would be only one message exchanged between the groups (H1 -> H2), and then H2 would distribute it internally within the cloud Group2. As internal cloud traffic is free, you only pay for one message sent from H1 to H2. Given that number of nodes in the cloud Group2 is dynamic and can grow very fast upon request, such cost-optimized communication between external nodes and the cloud essentially becomes the most cost-effective way to communicate with the cloud.

On top of that, GridGain will also support one way connections. So, for example, if your cloud firewall is configured not to allow external connections but to allow incoming connections, then H1 will connect to H2. If your firewall is configured the other way, then H2 will connect to H1.

Stay tuned for GridGain 3.0 release scheduled for Q4 this year.