Atomikos: Reli­a­bil­i­ty for the Cloud

The cloud phe­nom­e­non is an in­ter­est­ing one, and a nat­ur­al evo­lu­tion of the out­sourc­ing mod­el. While a lot is go­ing on around cloud com­put­ing it­self, lit­tle is be­ing said about re­li­a­bil­i­ty.

Do clouds of­fer re­li­a­bil­i­ty? In a way yes: caching sys­tems like Ter­ra­cot­ta, Gem­stone or Or­a­cle's Co­her­ence of­fer a fail-safe mode for avail­abil­i­ty of your data in the form of caches. So if a cloud node goes down, chances are that a live copy of the data still ex­ists some­where else, which means that your process can con­tin­ue work­ing else­where.

All is fine (or most­ly fine) if you are work­ing with a sin­gle data­base and are pro­cess­ing, say, web re­quests in the cache. After all, if you only have one data­base and no oth­er re­sources then you don't even need some­thing like a trans­ac­tion man­ag­er (or Atomikos, for that mat­ter). There are at least two sit­u­a­tions where things change:

• If you queue cache up­dates to en­able write-be­hind, then you find your­self in a queu­ing sce­nario and are pro­cess­ing jobs from a queue to a data­base. En­ter dis­trib­uted trans­ac­tions.
• If you are not pro­cess­ing web re­quests but rather get queued re­quests from the start. En­ter dis­trib­uted trans­ac­tions.

In both cas­es you should at least con­sid­er us­ing a trans­ac­tion man­ag­er. In both cas­es, Atomikos is a good choice for the fol­low­ing rea­sons:

• It's open source (or at least our ba­sic ver­sion is)
• It's very light-weight and easy to de­ploy (mean­ing it lends it­self eas­i­ly to cloud-ori­ent­ed vir­tu­al­ized con­fig­u­ra­tions)
• It bun­dles over 10 years of ex­pe­ri­ence and mar­ket lead­er­ship
• It pro­vides full crash re­cov­ery and all oth­er bells and whis­tles - un­like many of the built-in so­lu­tions that you will find in a cache

So in that way, Atomikos pro­vides "re­li­a­bil­i­ty for the cloud".