Open Source ESBs and Esper CEP

Stefan Ried, a former SoftwareAG now at Forrester has given an interesting take on possible strategies for Open Source ESBs during a recent Expert Meeting on BPM/BAM/CEP/SOA/EDA.

You can read it from there.
It is interesting to see CEP in the ESB capabilities list for 2008 (as a reminder 2008 is this year). This trend is definitely an interesting one, and folks like WSO2/Synapse have actually already done some prototype work with Esper - as described here on Paul' blog.

You can definitely bet you'll hear much more about those ESBs / CEP integration with Esper throughout this year, despite it is already doable without federating capabilities in one server but using an ESB and an Esper event server bridged together with any kind of transport(JMS f.e.). This has the benefit of keeping the ESB stateless, rather than making it stateful (I consider CEP to be of a stateful kind) but certainly makes the architecture slightly more advanced so I am sure either ways will find their fans.

Open Source Event-Driven SOA is right on Esper' track and WSO2/Synapse has definitely made some good steps forward already despite productization is not yet there right now. Let's wish Mule and JBossESB catch up so as to provide users choices yet consistent CEP semantics - thru Esper of course!

Backup your data with MirrorFolder

I thought I'd blog about a great affordable piece of Windows Software: MirrorFolder. It provides a software level real-time RAID-1 mode that can backup files in real time, and I am also largely using the option to auto-synchronize my backups upon connection of my USB hard drives. There is also a whole bunch of options for fine grained configuration.

The 4.x version now includes a centralized GUI that is a great complement to the Windows shell integration (right click on a folder to configure its backup strategy).
Get it from Techsoft. It's 39 US$ so close to just 20 euros these days. Lucky me.

CEP vendors: RIP Kaskad, new Pion, and same IBM

End of 2007 has been an interesting time for the Complex Event Processing (CEP) ecosystem.
First, Kaskad adds itself to the RIP list and closes business as reported by Marc and confirmed by Kaskad former CTO Colin Clark. This was 16 employees. So for those who would argue that a company with 16 employees is going to sustain better than one with less than 5 in the same market, well, not that obvious.
I am not surprised by the news. Back in February 2007, Kaskad had announced it would open source part of it offering. I had asked them for more details both privately and publicly several time as I found the news interesting especially from an Esper and EsperTech perspective but never got any answer from Kaskad team. I wonder if they weren't already dead back that time...

Other news I could spot thanks to Marco: some Californians have started to chase the CEP market with an open source approach ala Esper - Pion from AtomicLabs: Our goal is to build the world's #1 open source platform for complex event processing.
It is actually quite far to compare to Esper, might be implemented in C++ and not Java / .Net, and has yet to be proven and most importantly has yet to expose some real CEP features especially some Event Processing Language (EPL). Data or event processing is not CEP. Welcome aboard guys and good license choice by the way (Affero GPL will ensure SaaS customers will have to buy something from them as well).

Finally, IBM just woke up with WebSphere CTO saying CEP is SOA next big thing. Once again few notes here... What Jerry Cuomo says is actually ...I really believe it's the next big thing in SOA, and that's event processing. So he jumps on the CEP wagon but in fact extends its scope to event processing to make the point. Well, who would disagree with that then?
I actually talked about the CEP - SOA - Event Processing relationship in my JavaOne Esper presentation back early 2007.
I am really looking forward to see what IBM will really deliver in that space, beyond research, research, research, forward looking announcements like SystemS or tiny limited features additions here and there (see ObjectGrid CEP f.e.).
I bet the next CTO will finally acknowledge that XTP meets SOA precisely through CEP and this one is really the next big thing - ie CEP is far from being just in SOA.
For some reason Jerry forgot to add XTP to his mix ;-)

2008 is going to be an interesting transition year for the CEP space as everyone is basically working on it growth, be it with open source, evangelizing, use case solving, or SOA bandwagon.

The 1 million events per second CEP

BEA has finally published some paper on WebLogic Event Server performance.
It is available here (registration required).

They finally jump in the vendor dance of the 1 million events per second ESP/CEP claim that I had blogged about before here, thus catching up with EsperTech' Esper and all others - unfortunately only as far as these performance claims mean.

What is nice is that BEA provides details on the actual scenario, continuous queries and hardware used although the kit is not available for one to run on his own. To date Esper is still the only one to be completely open in the CEP performance area with full disclosure of results but also actual performance kit source code (see here).

Giving it a quick read, here is what I can sum up:




(both use a one thread per connection model to avoid context switching)

So obviously the BEA Event Server performs well, no doubt on that. This said there are a few immediate comments:

• The Esper benchmark somewhat set the stage, with a platform more than 4 times smaller (all ratio preserved, Esper appears almost 2.5 times faster though we cannot really compare things).
• The Esper benchmark EPL statements are more complex, especially regarding memory profile: they keep sliding windows of 1000 events where the BEA benchmark keeps 2 or 3 events.
• The Esper benchmark runs with more statements (1000 instead of 400). This is interesting as running more statement likely means less statement-level contention - so I am wondering why BEA is not running more statements here.
• The BEA benchmark does not disclose CPU usage, and for some reason the average latency is high compared to the 99.99% latency (ie the worst case latency must be high). There are probably differences in the way the two benchmarks actually measure latency (total run, post warm up, snapshots etc).
  

Unfortunately, I haven't a quad CPU quad core Intel Caneland box in my lab to play further with this. This being said, the two benchmarks are completely meaningless as the use cases are highly specifics and narrowed down, so you should really read all this as vendor standard claims, or run your own benchmark for your own business meaningful scenario.

Welcome BEA in the 1 million events per second CEP category, and kudos to them for disclosing (almost) all the details.

I also encourage you to read what Opher Etzion from IBM say on this, or also read what StreamBase published recently on their own benchmark to understand why all those claims are... really just claims up until the point you do your own evaluation!

on GPL and dual licensing

db4o has just published a paper written by a law firm Greenberg Traurig on GPL and dual licensing. This is core of their community and commercial business model, just as it is for Esper and EsperTech.

That is one of the best and most of to date resources on GPL and dual licensing I have ever read, and I 'd encourage anyone working and using GPL code to read and understand it. It also does cover GPL and hosted projects (Application Service Provider), work for hire and distributor (of course) situation.

You may read there: You may hear people argue about whether the GPL is a contract or not. The important thing to understand is that whether it is or not, if you accept code under GPL terms you must abide by the GPL. If you breach the GPL, your rights under GPL license terminate, and you have no right to use the code at all. If this happens, you will be infringing the licensor’s copyright, and copyright infringement puts you at risk of civil damages or even criminal culpability with the possibility of heavy fines.


Read it from there or PDF here directly from db4o website.

If you want to read further on GPL and dual licensing, the following law blog is quite interesting as well.