Presentation: "Cloud Data Persistence"

Time: Wednesday 15:45 - 16:45

Location: Fleming Room

Abstract:

Data persistence is a basic building block of almost any software system - applications need to save and retrieve data. Last year marked the 30th anniversary of the commercial RDMBS, a technology that has been with us for most of our working lives, and has - in a way similar to how ducklings imprint on their mother - shaped our thinking about how modern, general computer programs deal with data persistence.

Today, however, as we stumble forward into the era of "cloud" computing, the various architectures that fall under the cloud umbrella - ranging from resource provisioning and service components of Amazon's AWS to richer service platforms like Google's App Engine to large-scale consumer-facing systems like Facebook - all work on a scale in which the classic RDBMS, if even present, is stretched past the limits of its capabilities as requirements for size, reliability, and geographic span pit these solutions against the constraints of technology and physics.

Fortunately, new persistence technologies are being developed, providing developers and architects with new "ingredients" with which to build systems, both large and small. These new technologies are fundamentally different than the RDMS systems that many to most of us are familiar with, and these differences require us to change how we model and manage our data. This talk provides an overview of some of these new data persistence technologies, and shows how these technologies are going to let developers rethink how they design, deploy and manage the data for their applications.

Geir Magnusson

 Geir  Magnusson

Geir Magnusson Jr. is the VP of Engineering at 10gen Inc, a "cloud" technology startup in NYC. He has a diverse background in both commercial technology development as well as open source. Commercially he's been a technology leader for companies such as Joost, Intel, IBM/Gluecode and Adeptra. He's a member of the Apache Software Foundation and currently serves on the Board of Directors.

He was instrumental in the founding of several open source Java projects, including Apache Harmony, an open source implementation of Java SE, Apache Geronimo, an open source implementation of Java EE, and others, such as Apache Velocity. In addition, he represents the Apache Software Foundation on the Executive Committee of the JCP where he's focused on making the JCP safe for open source implementations through better community transparency as well as IP clarity and fairness. He was an original recipient of a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award recognizing his work in the Java ecosystem.