Software Engineering Radio

Recording Venue: Oracle Java One 2010, San Francisco
Guest: Nati Shalom

Host: Robert

In this episode, Robert talks with Nati Shalom about the emergence of large-system architectures consisting of a grid of high-memory nodes. As memory has become faster and cheaper more rapidly than has disk storage, application state has increasingly migrated to memory in the form of caches. Memory grids take this one step further, using memory as the system of record and disk is used as a write-behind journal for recovery purposes.  Data and processing are colocated on the same node, which hosts what would be multiple tiers in the popular multi-tiered architectures. Data partitioning and distributed algorithms such as map-reduce become critical design decisions. Nati also discusses reliability and availability considerations of memory grids.

Links:

• Nati Shalom’s blog
• Nati Shalom’s slides on slideshare
• Gigaspaces
• Nati Shalom on Twitter
• Designing a Scalable Twitter
• RAM is the new disk
• The Case for RAMClouds by Ousterhout et. al.
• Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing?

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Recording Venue: OOP 2007
Guest(s): Kevlin Henney
Frank Buschmann

Host(s): Markus
In this Episode we talked about the new POSA 4 book which has recently been published. We talk to two of the authors, Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann (the third author, Doug Schmidt was not available – and he had also been on the podcast a couple of times ). The book contains a pattern language for distributed systems. It contains 114 patterns that had been published before by many different other authors. The patterns have been rewritten to form a consistent language.
We basically talked through the different sections of the book, which gives a really good overview over the challenges and the solutions of building distributed systems. These sections include From Mud to Structure, Distribution Infrastructure, Event Demultiplexing and Dispatching, Interface Partitioning, Component Patitioning, Application Contrl, Concurrency, Synchronization, Object Interaction, Adaptazion and Extension, Modal Behaviour, Resource Management and finally, Database Access.

The book references several other previous works (as listed below). Interestingly, many of these referenced works and authors have also been discussed previously on the podcast. Here are the back references:

• Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans
• Messaging Patterns, Gregor Hohpe
• POSA 2 Patterns, Doug Schmidt
• Concurrency: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and the interview with Goetz and Holmes
• Remoting Patterns Part 1 and Part 2
• POSA3, Resource Management

Links:

• Gregor Hohpe’s Messaging book
• Patterns of Enterprise Architecture
• Eric Evans’s DDD book
• Martin Fowler’s Analysis Patterns
• Remoting Patterns book
• Server Component Patterns book
• POSA 5
• POSA 3
• POSA 4
• Security Patterns book
• POSA 2
• POSA 1
• Jens Coldewey’s Database Stuff

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Recording Venue: OOPSLA 2006
Guest(s): Linda Northrop,
Doug Schmidt,
Kevin Sullivan,
Gregor Kiczales

Host(s): Markus
This Episode is a round table discussion about Ultra-Large Scale Systems. In 2006, a number of authors (among them our guests Linda Northrop, Doug Schmidt, Kevin Sullivan, and Gregor Kiczales) have produced a report that addressed the following question:

Given the issues with today’s software engineering, how can we build the systems of the future that are likely to have billions of lines of code?

In this episode, our guests discuss many of the issues that arise from this kind of system and provide an overview of the research areas that should be investigated in order to tackle the challenge. If you want to get more detailed information, you can read the ULS Report (PDF).

Links:

• The ULS Report (PDF).

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Recording Venue: JAOO 2006
Guest(s): Werner Vogels

Host(s): Markus
This episode is an interview with Werner Vogels, the CTO of amazon.com. We first talked about what scalability is, and which aspects there are to scalability. We then took a brief look at the technologies used at amazon, specifically, the middleware systems and the issue of vendor lock-in. Web services, and the role of SOA was the next topic. Then we covered what a service actually is add Werner explained the term “pizza teams”. Testing and Deployment was the next topic followed by a look at architectural characteristics of scalable systems, the value of simplicity and the CAP theorem. We concluded the discussion with a brief look at the future of distributed systems

Links:

• Amazon S3
• Werner Vogels’ Blog
• Elasitc Compute Cloud

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Recording Venue: JAOO 2006
Guest(s): Steve Vinoski
Host(s): Markus
This episode is an interview with Steve Vinoski. Steve works as the Chief Engineer for IONA. He’s what you’d call a middleware guru, he was for example deeply involved with CORBA. So, this interview centers mainly around middleware. We begin by talking about his own history wrt. middleare and ORBs and how ORBs evolved over time. We then talked about whether coarse-grained, stateless components might be a better abstraction for distributed systems than “objects”. We then covered the future of CORBA, it’s use in ethe embedded space as well as the practical relevance of the POSA patterns when building ORBs. Then we switched topics and addressed the role of web services as a “middleware middleware” and the maturity of WS-* specifications. We then looked at what Steve is working on these days, which is e.g. the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP) as well as dynamic languages. We concluded the interwiew with his view on SOA.

Links:

• CeltixFire Service Framework
• QPid AMQP implementation
• IONA’s Artix ESB
• His Book, Advanced CORBA Programming with C++
• Steve’s Blog

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Doug Schmidt

Host(s): Markus
In this episode we talk with Doug Schmidt. Doug is a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University and a well-respected authority in the fields of middleware, patterns and model-driven development. In this interview we talk about these topics in the context of distributed, realtime embedded (DRE) systems.

Links:

• POSA 2 Book
• OMG Data Distribuion Service
• CORBA
• TAO, The ACE ORB
• OMG MIC PSIG
• Doug’s Web Site
• Vanderbilt ISIS
• GME Tool

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