we're pleased to announce the C++ and C# 8.2.0.Alpha1 release.
This is the first step on the 8.2 roadmap, which is not formally defined in a Jira at the moment but will surely include: SASL authentication, continuous queries, cluster counters.
In this release you can try and enjoy an Alpha version of the SASL authentication, sample code is here (C++, C#). Tell us what you think!
Once upon a time Infinispan cache configurations were all orphans.
Actually, it wasn't as sad as that: they all shared a single parent - the default cache.
While this gave caches a limited form of inheritance, it led to confusion as users weren't really aware of it and it was impossible to turn it off: the limited gene pool was propagating possibly unwanted traits to all of its children.
Templates and real configuration inheritance
Infinispan 7.2 finally introduced proper configuration templates and inheritance. But there was a catch. Backwards compatibility dictated that the "default mother of all caches" behaviour survived.
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In the above example, the default cache is a replicated cache with a file store. The distributed cache inherits the "transactional" configuration. However, because of default inheritance present up to Infinispan 8.2, the distributed-cache also ended up having a file store. Confusing or what !?!
The best workaround was to never give it a specific configuration, let Infinispan use its internal defaults and essentially avoid it. Just like the black sheep in the family.
Bye bye default cache
With Infinispan 9.0 we decided it was finally time to cut the umbilical cord between the default cache and all the other caches: if you declare one, it will never be used as default inheritance for every other cache. In the above example, the distributed cache won't have a file store any more.
We've gone even further: unless you declare a default cache, we will not even set one up for you, not even one with default settings!
Aleksandr Sergeevich Serebrovskii, the Russian geneticist who first formulated the concept of the gene pool and the diversity benefits it brings, would be proud of us.
Exactly one week ago I was presenting a talk on big data in action with Infinispan and two days later the video has already been uploaded!! Fastest ever conference video release I've seen! Kudos to Berlin Buzzwords 👏
The slides for the talk can be found here, and the video is here:
Berlin Buzzwords was a very interesting conference. Similar to J On The Beach, it's a conference focused on data related technologies, but Berlin Buzzwords had a more Apache focus. So, you had many talks on Solr, Lucene, Spark, Flink, Kafka, Beam...etc, as well as Apache spinoffs such as ElasticSearch.
The conference was very well organised and the talks were good, although I did miss some demos in the talks I attended. Having been presenting Infinispan for over 8 years, I am fully aware that coming up with data related demos is not an easy task. However, with some many open data streams available these days, there has never been a bigger opportunity to put some of that data to work in a live demo and demonstrate why your tech is so awesome.
From an Infinispan perspective, it was fascinating talking to Flink, Beam...etc developers and learn how Infinispan could be integrated with these projects. We already have Hadoop and Spark integrations, but we're not standing still and we will continue to integrate with other popular data processing technologies.
On a personal level, it was awesome to meet William Benton once again and we had some very interesting discussions about Radanalytics, a project that helps you build data-driven applications on top of OpenShift. I also had some interesting chats with fellow Basel residents working for Baloise insurance group and the University of Basel.
The implementation of cache authorization in Infinispan has traditionally followed the JAAS model of wrapping calls in a PrivilegedAction invoked through Subject.doAs(). This led to the following cumbersome pattern:
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We also provided an implementation which, instead of relying on enabling the SecurityManager, could use a lighter and faster ThreadLocal for storing the Subject:
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While this solves the performance issue, it still leads to unreadable code.
This is why, in Infinispan 9.1 we have introduced a new way to perform authorization on caches:
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Obviously, for multiple invocations, you can hold on to the "impersonated" cache and reuse it:
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Are you attending Berlin Buzzwords and want to find out more how Infinispan can help your systems react to real-time data quickly, and see the cool stuff we have for data analytics, make sure you come to my talk on Big Data In Action with Infinispan on Tuesday, 13th June at 16:30.
