Cross posted from The Pivotal POV Blog…
Pivotal GemFire 8 was the first major release of the in-memory distributed database since it joined Pivotal’s portfolio of products. Today, we’re announcing the release of Pivotal GemFire 8.1. Part of the Pivotal Big Data Suite, Pivotal GemFire enables developers to deploy their big data NoSQL apps upon a massive scale. In addition to incremental product improvements, 8.1 enhances GemFire’s availability and resilience within a distributed system, and improves upon its management and monitoring features.
Allowing High Availability, Resilience, and Global Scale
In a distributed system, node failures are expected and can easily be managed, but network failures are a bit trickier. In GemFire 8.0, support for Automatic Reconnect of members was added to make clusters more robust in the event of network outages.
In Pivotal GemFire 8.1, we have enhanced this capability by adding:
- Support for systems that use multicast discovery
- Support for auto reconnect of multiple locators in the event of larger failures
In addition, we enriched the client API to allow developers to decide what to do in case the client disconnects and reconnects to the cluster, effectively missing some messages. The messages are durable in the cluster, however, the client can now decide if they want to disregard the messages they missed, or process them.
In addition, Pivotal GemFire 8.1 adds new APIs and gfsh commands to allow the manual start of gateway receivers and the rebalancing of gateway senders.
Management, Monitoring, and Administrative Features
Pivotal GemFire eases the administration, management, and monitoring of apps running on a massive distributed system through robust tools that automate common tasks, allow analysis of current status and historical performance, and provide direct command line management of nodes. Pivotal GemFire 8.1 enhances these capabilities with these new updates and features:
- Updated internal logging system to use Apache Log4j 2
- Improved management and monitoring features, including SSL security configuration and LDAP authentication enhancements for the Pulse monitoring tool
Development Features
To help developers deliver custom applications at global scale, Pivotal GemFire provides a host of developer-centric features. Pivotal GemFire 8.1 adds the following updates:
- Enhanced PDX serialization configuration including the ability to rename PDX classes using aliases
- Improved GemFire querying and index creation, including query index hints and the ability to create multiple indexes
- Improved APIs for batch operations to region entries, including the addition of the removeAll API
- Added new REST API endpoints and SSL configuration
Additional Enhancements
As well as these improvements and updates, Pivotal GemFire 8.1 adds a number of general product improvements. These include an update of HTTP modules to version 8.1, updated support of Spring Data GemFire 1.5 which enables developers to start servers in GemFire by providing a Spring context XML file upon server startup, XSD cache.xml validation, and more.
Additional Resources
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