Companies undergoing digital transformations often experience performance and scalability limitations with their existing applications. The massive amounts of data generated by their applications overwhelm their existing architecture, preventing them from processing data in real-time to meet end- user performance requirements. Limits on performance and scalability prevent enterprises from capitalizing on trends, introducing new features, and gaining real-time business insights based on the massive amount of data generated by their applications. Their architectures prevent them from fully using their data to meet end-user performance requirements, capitalize on business opportunities, and gain the crucial insights that allow them to make the right business decisions in real-time.

The GridGain in-memory computing platform solves these challenges without requiring a rip-and-replace of their existing databases or applications. The GridGain in-memory computing platform is inserted between existing application and data layers to speed up and scale-out applications. GridGain is a distributed computing solution that users deploy on a cluster of server nodes, not on a single server like many relational databases. GridGain can spread the data in a user’s existing monolithic database across a cluster of commodity servers, which provides massive scalability and unparalleled speed to the application. GridGain maintains the application data in memory and uses massively parallel processing (MPP) to leverage the pooled CPU power of the entire cluster to provide up to a 1,000 times increase in application performance.

GridGain unleashes the competitive advantage of real-time business, whether it is deployed on-premises, in a public or private cloud, or on a hybrid environment. GridGain Systems solutions are the most comprehensive, enterprise-grade in-memory computing solution for high-volume transactions, real-time analytics, and hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP). GridGain’s customers use the GridGain in-memory computing platform for a wide variety of use cases that require speed and scalability. GridGain Systems customers span leading companies in financial services, fintech, software, eCommerce, retail, telecommunications, online business services, healthcare, and more. Example customers include ING, Raymond James, American Express, Societe Generale, Finastra, IHS Markit, ServiceNow, Marketo, RingCentral, American Airlines, Agilent, and United Healthcare. GridGain is a sponsor and participant in leading foundations that support open source and cloud computing including the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Linux Foundation. GridGain Systems investors include Almaz Capital, Talos Investments, RTP Ventures, and Broadway Angels.

Simplifying Apache Ignite and Empowering Developers

Apache Ignite is like a software version of a Swiss Army Knife. With so many features and uses, deploying and configuring it can confuse even an experienced developer. Until now. GridGain Nebula was created to simplify Ignite. It’s a public cloud service designed to help developers deploy, run, monitor, manage, and troubleshoot in-memory applications running any flavor of Apache Ignite or GridGain in any environment.

Because so many different software editions and configurations are possible across Apache Ignite and GridGain, this article will simplify by using “Ignite” as shorthand for any version of Ignite or GridGain deployed in any environment.

The Two Modes of GridGain Nebula

GridGain Nebula provides developers with two complementary approaches for working with Ignite clusters: create and monitor

• Create New Cluster: Create a fully-managed cluster in GridGain’s cloud. In this approach, you specify and provision the cluster which the GridGain team manages for you. This frees up your team to develop and run custom applications. 
• Monitor Existing Cluster: Attach to a GridGain or Apache Ignite cluster running in your private or public environment. In this approach, Nebula provides Ignite developers and administrators with a visual interface to monitor, troubleshoot, maintain and scale clusters.

Deploy Ignite

Deploying Ignite involves provisioning hardware or cloud instances, downloading and installing Ignite, and configuring Ignite according to the latest best practices. This can be done manually and you can use other features of GridGain Nebula later, to monitor and manage an application. Or you can use the wizard in Nebula to simplify the entire Ignite lifecycle with automated provisioning of hardware in a cloud provider of your choice, installing Ignite, configuring it with best practices (e.g., SSL, security, and backups). Connect to the provisioned cluster as usual with all the standard Ignite clients, including Java, .Net, C++, Python, JDBC, and more.

Experienced Ignite users are familiar with setting up a cluster in their private environments via the Ignite command line, without the simplicity offered by GridGain Nebula. Newer Ignite users will enjoy Nebula’s “Create New Cluster” functionality which provides a visual interface for setting up an optimized cloud-hosted cluster in as few as 7 minutes.

The process of setting up an Ignite cluster begins with a few important decisions, including the on premises or cloud data center where the cluster will reside, the node resource capacity, and the cluster size. Cluster configurations are based on best practices to help ensure that each cluster is configured properly from the start.

Optional configuration settings, such as storage data region allocation, enable developers to decide whether the cluster nodes should be persistent, in- memory, or a combination of the two. Security access lists, SSL, and authentication are also configurable.

The cluster will be provisioned by Nebula in less than 7 minutes, and then applications can be connected through a wide variety of client APIs and languages, including JDBC, Java thin client, Java thick client, Python, REST, .NET, and more. Connection templates provide sample snippets that can be tailored to the application code.

Run Ignite

After an Ignite cluster is deployed, someone needs to keep it running. It requires constant monitoring, maintaining the hardware, applying software upgrades and security patches, and resolving incidents. Nebula can help with all of that.

The clusters deployed with Nebula are actively managed by the GridGain support team. The team monitors cluster health and is responsible for maintenance, restarts, and recovery to maintain SLAs. Managed GridGain clusters include automated daily backups of cluster data.

Meet the leader behind the success of GridGain

Eoin O’Connor serves as GridGain’s President and CEO and is leading the company’s efforts to drive continued rapid growth, broaden the customer base, and enhance its distributed in-memory computing product offerings. Eoin joined GridGain in 2016 as chief financial officer and was appointed to his current position in 2022. In his previous roles at GridGain, he was responsible for finance & accounting, sales operations, legal, human resources, corporate compliance and IT.