With the latest push towards the cloud in the industry and some M&A actions in cloud area we are beginning to be faced more and more with a simple question - what does it mean to build an application for a cloud? At GridGain we strongly believe that for an application to take a real advantage of the cloud it should have some of the following characteristcs:

• Massively Parallel Computations
• Massively Parallel Data
• Auto-Scalability On the Cloud

I like to call applications with such characteristics Native Cloud Applications, or NCAs. With our upcoming GridGain 3.0 release we are planning to build a Cloud Development Platform that will allow you easily build and deploy NCAs on any of the existing cloud providers. So what do the above mentioned characteristics really mean?

Massively Parallel Computation
An application that supports massively Parallel Computation is a application that can simply distribute computations in an environment such as cloud, where resources can be added or removed at any moment either manually or automatically. If you add a resource, your application has to take immediate advantage of it and start distributing computations onto it (the vice versa should apply whenever you remove a resource). In GridGain we achieve massively parallel computations with our innovative MapReduce implementation, Automatic Peer Class loading, and Adapter Discovery and Communication SPIs.

Massively Parallel Data
Well, you may think that most clouds already have distributed storage, so you can just use it. The reality here is that storage like S3 on Amazon provides a distributed disk storage. It does not provide distributed In-Memory storage like a distributed cache or data grid. Google GAE does provide it to a certain extent, but as a cloud, it is less flexible to use than Amazon. So, in order to take a full advantage of the cloud your application In-Memory storage must dynamically increase whenever new resources get added and vise versa. GridGain 3.0 is coming with a comprehensive dynamically partitioned data grid solution that does just that.

Auto-Scalability On The Cloud
A NCA must be able to automatically instruct the cloud to scale up or scale down depending on current load and latency characteristics. In GridGain 3.0 user will be able to specify dynamic SLAs or strategies that will allow to add any kind of resource to a cloud, from addtional memory or CPU to starting or removing an arbitrary number of images.

Although we are adding such a complex and comprehensive feature set, our emphasis on ease of use and ease of deployment has not changed. Stay tuned for our upcoming release.

GridGain will be presenting at CJUG - Chicago Java User Group at Chicago, IL, on Tuesday August 18th. If you are around the Chicago area and interesting in Cloud Computing - come see our presentation. As usual we'll have lively discussion on clouds and grids, get a preview on our upcoming GridGain 3.0 release, and as always plenty of live coding that you won't see anywhere else - live grid application in 10 minutes from scratch!

Hope to see you there!

Last month was a very good month for GridGain as we achieved a few important milestones. First and foremost, we crossed a threshold of 1 million starts. Since GridGain product was first launched 2 years ago (around August 2007), GridGain nodes were started over a million times across the globe. This is a very conservative number... I am sure the real number is at least 30% higher. Here is a graph of GridGain starts since the beginning:

The vertical axis has number of starts, and the horizontal axis shows time in months. According to these stats, a GridGain node is started at least every 30 seconds somewhere around the globe.

Another pretty cool stat is our forums usage. We have arguably the most active user community among all the products in the same space. Our forums have over 3,000 messages and over 80,000 views which is very good for a product in this space.

An lastly, there is no bigger reward for any Open Source contributor than kind user testimonials. Here is a few of the latest testimonials we received from our users and customers:

Thanks a lot for your help and for the great product. I'm starting to use Gridgain for one of our production systems and up to this point I had only joy! Keep up the good work.
--jjoubert

I am a big fan of GridGain. We at [...] implemented our solutions with GridGain capability. It is very impressive to my clients whenever we did presentations. Excellent products which helps us solving big problem for us. [...] offers software on SaaS market space which requires huge computing power when number of clients increase. GridGain provides the answer to our problem.
--Charles Hsiao

Thanks for an amazing product. I had considered several others, but GridGain is the most intuitive and well-documented.
--Andrew Hallock

You can find more user testimonials here. It's the usage stats and testimonials like this that keep us motivated to continually make GridGain the best Open Cloud Platform out there.