The Data Platform is responsible for storing, retrieving and manipulating data across a dynamic set of distributed nodes, elastically acquired from the underlying IaaS Cloud provider(s). The Data Platform Programming APIs have been designed to simplify the development of large scale data centric applications deployed on cloud infrastructure. They include the Object Grid Mapper, the Search API and the Distributed Execution Framework. To this end, the programmatic interfaces offered by the Cloud-TM Data Platform allow to:
Lower in the stack we find a highly scalable, adaptive In-memory Distributed Transactional Key-Value Store/Distributed Transactional Memory(DTM), which represents the backbone of the Cloud-TM Data Platform. In order to maximize the visibility, impact and future exploitation of the results of the Cloud-TM project, the consortium agreed to use Red Hat's Infinispan as the starting point for developing this essential component of the Cloud-TM Platform. Throughout the project Infinispan has been extended with innovative data management algorithms (in particular for what concerns data replication and distribution aspects), as well as with real-time self-reconfiguration schemes aimed at guaranteeing optimal performance even in highly dynamic cloud environments Data Platform Programming APIs The APIs exposed by the Cloud-TM Data Platform can be classified into three main categories: Object Grid Data Mapper, Query Support, Distributed Execution Framework. Object Grid Data Mapper: Hibernate OGM and Fénix Framework Hibernate OGM Download - Fénix Framework Dowload The Object Grid Data Mapper (OGDM) module is responsible for handling the mapping from the object-oriented data model, which is used by the programmer, to the <key, value> pair data model, which is employed by the underlying Distributed Transactional Data Grid platform. One of the earliest design decisions for the Cloud-TM Platform was to base the API of the OGDM module on the well-known, industry standard, and widely accepted Java Persistence API (JPA). Some of the expected advantages of this approach was to ease the adoption of the Cloud-TM platform by the masses of programmers already familiar with JPA, and to provide a smoother migration path for applications already built on top of JPA. Hibernate OGM, builds on the mature and robust infrastructure provided by Hibernate ORM to provide such a JPA-compatible implementation for the Cloud-TM OGDM module. Yet, there are significantly new challenges to be tackled in the mapping to a distributed transactional data grid, such as being able to explore data locality on a highly distributed environment. Not knowing beforehand what where the best solutions for these challenges, nor whether they would require changes at the programming model, enforcing strict compliance with JPA seemed too limiting to start with. Moreover, OGM, being tightly dependant on Hibernate ORM, is a complex software project with a very large code base. Thus a strategic design decision for the Cloud-TM Platform was to provide an alternative API to the OGDM module. Namely, a simpler API that could allow us to rapidly prototype and validate the platform ca- pabilities, engaging in lower time risk compared to developing the same in the scope of the more complex and comprehensive Hibernate OGM. The API provided by the Fénix Framework.Query Support: Hibernate Search Hibernate Search Download Hibernate Search is an Object/Index Mapper: it binds the full-text index technology implemented by Apache Lucene to the Object Oriented world. Hibernate Search consists of an indexing and an index search component. Both are backed by Apache Lucene. Its core engine component only depends on Apache Lucene so that the Object/Index mapping engine can be reused in different projects and environments - in particular Infinispan Query. Hibernate Search also provides a module to integrate it with Hibernate ORM and the Fnix framework also has an integration with Hibernate Search. Distributed Execution Framework (DEF) DEF Download as part of Infinispan The Distributed Execution Framework aims at providing a set of abstractions to simplify the development of parallel applications, allowing ordinary programmers to take full advantage of the processing power available by the set of distributed nodes of the Cloud-TM Platform without having to deal with low level issues such as load distribution, thread synchronization and scheduling, fault-tolerance. Unlike most other distributed frameworks, the Cloud-TM Distributed Execution Framework uses data from the transactional data platform’s nodes as input for execution tasks. This provides a number of relevant advantages: The Distributed In-memory Transactional Data Grid Infinispan Download The backbone of the Cloud-TM Data Platform is represented by Infinispan, a highly scalable, in-memory distributed key-value store with support for transactions. Born as an open-source project sponsored by Red Hat, Infinispan has been selected as the reference Distributed Transactional Data Grid platform for the Cloud-TM project. Throughout the project Infinispan has been extended with innovative data management algorithms (in particular for what concerns data replication and distribution aspects), as well as with real-time self-reconfiguration schemes aimed at guaranteeing optimal performance even in highly dynamic cloud environments. The architecture of Infinispan is extremely flexible and supports a range of operational modes: standalone (non-clustered) mode, or distributed mode. In the standalone mode, it works as a shared-memory (centralized) Software Transactional Mem- ory (STM), providing support for transactions and offering key/value store interface. In the following we overview key components that have been developed or significantly extended during the Cloud-TM’s project.
Consistency and Replication: the GMU protocol The mechanisms for enforcing data consistency in presence of concurrent data manipulations and possible failures is of paramount importance for a distributed in-memory transactional data platform. In the scope of the project, Infinispan has been extended with a novel, highly scalable distributed multi-versioning scheme, called GMU, which has the following unique characteristics:
The GMU protocol has been shown to scale up to more than 150 nodes as we can see in the following plot where we use the Vacation-Mix benchmark. Dynamic Adaptation of the Replication Strategy: Polymorphic Replication Another unique feature that was incorporated in the Cloud-TM Data Grid is the ability to dynamically adapt the distributed protocol employed to ensure data consistency, a feature that we called polymorphic replication. The key observation motivating this feature is that, as the vast literature in the area of transactional data consistency protocols demonstrate, no one-size-fits-all solution exists that guarantees optimal performance across all possible applications’ workloads. In order to achieve optimal efficiency even in presence of dynamically changing workloads, the Data Platform:
The three replication strategies implemented are the following:
Self-tuning Data Placement: the AUTOPLACER Another highly innovative feature developed within the context of the Cloud-TM project is the, so called, AUTOPLACER scheme. In a distributed data platform, such as Cloud-TM, processing applications’ requests can imply accessing data that are stored remotely, i.e. on different nodes of the platform. Hence, the performance and scalability achievable by Cloud-TM’s applications can be affected by the quality of the algorithms used to distribute data among the nodes of the platforms. These should be accurate enough to guarantee high data locality (and minimize remote data accesses), as well as sufficiently lightweight and scalable to cope with large scale applications. AUTOPLACER addresses this problem by automatically identifying the data items having a sub-optimal placement onto the platform and re-locating them automatically to maximize access locality. Scalability and practical viability of AUTOPLACER are achieved via innovative probabilistic algorithms, which exploit stream-analysis and machine-learning techniques. Changing the Scale and Moving Data: the Non-Blocking State Transfer Another relevant feature, that has been recently introduced in Infinispan is the, so called Non-Blocking State Transfer (NBST). This feature allows Infinispan to keep on processing transactions even when the scale of the platform is changing, i.e. whenever nodes are leaving/joining the system, or while the placement of data is being rearranged, e.g. by the AUTOPLACER mechanism, or if the Autonomic Manager requests to alter the replication degree of data to optimize performance. This feature is extremely relevant as it allows to minimize the impact of platform reconfigurations on applications’ performance and availability. Also, the NBST feature is offered for all the GMU variants, which allows for providing minimally intrusive reconfiguration independently of the distributed protocol that is currently used to coordinate data management within the platform. |