The road to Infinispan 10 (Alpha1)

Dear all,

Today we are releasing 10.0.0.Alpha1 and 9.4.2.Final.

Infinispan 9.4.2.Final comes with a number of bug fixes and some small additional features:

• ISPN-9655 REST Access Log headers
• ISPN-8144 & ISPN-9661 Cross-Site replication statistics
• ISPN-9708 Expose the executor services through JMX
• ISPN-9732 Local iteration optimization with write behind is valid for non shared stores
• ISPN-9717 Fix Integer overflow for lifespan and maxIdle

We have begun working on what will become Infinispan 10. As with all new major releases, this will come with a number of important changes.

• New Server
  We are working on a new lightweight server, currently dubbed ServerNG, which will supersede the current WildFly-based offering. The new server will have a smaller disk and memory footprint, a new RESTful admin interface, improved security. It will still use familiar components (Elytron for security, Narayana for transactions, etc) but we hope that the installation and usability experience will be most improved. A dedicated blog post will describe in detail what is coming.
• Long-term Storage Format
  The persistent storage format will be changed so that it will be easier to transparently make changes to it without requiring further exporters/importers.
• Non-blocking listeners
  The listener implementation will be replaced with a non-blocking implementation.
• Asynchronous CacheLoader/Store
  Store operations will be ran in another thread to provide non blocking for main threads
• Improved statistics
  Infinispan statistics have been traditionally over-simplistic, offering mostly basic averages for writes and reads. We are going to implement percentiles on a histogram as well as recording tracing information so that you will be able to know how much time is being spent in the various subsystems (clustering, persistence, etc.)
• New API
  The current Infinispan API, based around Java's ConcurrentHashMap design, does not offer the flexibility required to support modern reactive designs as well as the various extensions we've added over the years (counters, multimaps, etc). We are therefore working on a new modern API design which we will be describing with a number of blog posts in the near future.
• Agroal JDBC Connection Pool
  We are replacing the JDBC connection pool implementation with Agroal.
• Kubernetes Operators
  Operators are all the rage in the Kubernetes world, and we are working on an Infinispan Operator which will take care of managing and monitoring the health of an Infinispan cluster, handle scale up/scale down safely, perform upgrades and more.

Infinispan 10.0.0.Alpha1 is the first release from our development branch. It currently includes the following features on top of what is in 9.4.2.Final:

• ISPN-9666 Agroal JDBC Connection pool
• ISPN-9688 Internal REST server modularization

Please report any issues in our issue tracker and join the conversation in our Zulip Chat to shape up our next release.