Generator for Infinispan clustered data grid

[NickGDev-zz]

Firstly hat's off to all contributing to jhipster it's a great expression of the power of spring. As a Java developer i have had the opportunity to work on a few commercial projects that utilise scalable data grids. With that i'd like to discuss Hazelcast's clustered encryption / SSL support and a possible alternative.

As of Hazelcast 3.4 (http://goo.gl/alZqvn) SSL is now an enterprise only feature. This is a regression in features supported by the community edition from v3.2 (http://goo.gl/882oWx). For many customers end-to-end encryption is a must so i would suggest jhipster provides alternative data grid that supports the same embedded data grid configuration, but with the option to enable further security.

Infinispan is not exactly winning the race in the Java data grid space and documentation can be patchy but it is performant and backed by RedHat (it's used as jboss/wildfly's native clustering technology). I feel it's worth offering it as an alternative as Hazelcast hasn't been very upfront about this change.

Hazelcast vs Infinispan white-paper - https://goo.gl/ssi3V Hazelcast vs Infinispan benchmark (old) - Interesting comparison - http://www.slideshare.net/tmatyashovsky/from-cache-to-in-memory-data-grid-introduction-to-hazelcast

[jdubois]

Looks like bad news, here are my thoughts:

• I've already had this conversation with Hazelcast, and of course we can have questions about their OSS roadmap. I will send them a tweet, linking to this issue, so we can have feedback from them.
• If we can be "cache vendor agnostic" it would be really great, but at the moment this just isn't possible. And having several providers means a lot of work to implement, but also to maintain. So it would be great to have another implementation, but I don't want to end up having 3 or 4 of them in the end. The the big question is, which other provider should we use?
• Infinispan is of course a good candidate: well known, backed by RedHat. I've had some bad experiences with it in the past, but that was mainly due to its JBoss integration. It's also supposed to be the default Hibernate 2nd level cache, which is also good for us.
• There's also Gemfire: it has been Open Sourced recently, and is made by Pivotal, like Spring, so it should be easier for us to work with. I've also seen it live on one project, and it was behaving extremely well. I just have 2 concerns: 1) will the Open Source project take off? 2) Is it fully Java and easy to embed in our project?

[gregrluck]

We have a commercial/open source business model. This architecture diagram makes it very clear: http://hazelcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Hazelcast-3.4-Architecture-r1.0.png The salmon coloured parts are all open source. We have a small number of enterprise features that are not required by almost all users, but large corporations with complex use cases use them.

The idea here is to ensure that we have both a viable open source project and a business. In that GridGain were open source, then closed source, then settled on a mix, with open source (now called Ignite) and added features in the Enterprise version. Our understanding is that Pivotal will be doing exactly the same with Gemfire. Infinispan is now the only open source IMDG which offering commercial support which does not have enterprise only features.

In terms of roadmap the only major thing not on the diagram which is planned for enterprise is Hot Restart. That will come in 3.6 and adds the ability to restart with caches loaded from SSD or possibly disk. It is most relevant to large caches of hundreds of GBs in size.

The problem with the pure open source support model is that it is hard enough to generate enough funds to get a significant. Red Hat is the exception but perhaps will be the only one. http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-want-to-be-the-next-red-hat/

We now have a 30 strong engineering team and we invest the majority of our time on open source Hazelcast.

Finally my understanding is that SSL is not required for this integration. Is that correct?

[jdubois]

Hi @gregrluck ! Really nice to have an answer directly from you!

I've looked at the diagram, and:

• Indeed SSL is an enterprise feature: that doesn't surprise me, and I am personally not worried about this
• But I see that "Web Sessions" is an Enterprise component, does this mean that our actual HTTP session clustering isn't Open Source?

I fully agree with your analysis of the current OSS market. Maybe we should add Infinispan, so that people have 3 options (with ehcache and HazelCast), so that everybody finds something suitable for his needs with JHipster. But this also adds a maintenance cost, and so that will depends whether this is complex to integrate or not.

[NickGDev-zz]

great feedback @jdubois & @gregrluck. It's understandable Hazelcast needs to find ways to generate revenue and don't get me wrong i feel it's a valuable product. From personal experience (outside of jhipster project) not having encryption is a deal breaker for smaller customers with sensitive client data.

In reality SSL isn't critical for jhipster but not having the option in a spring project is quite unusual and potentially limits the use cases of the project. As of late i am personally switching away from Hazelcast as most of my clients have some form of sensitive data but cant afford the per-node licensing. Being a supporter of the jhipster project i was concerned to see direct usage of Hazelcast's features e.g. the Web Sessions you mentioned.

This makes me question how tightly jhipster should couple with cache providers, maybe we should implement a generic cache provider for CacheConfiguration + API that can utilise multiple providers for features such as the WebConfigurer / spring-data / spring-cache?

[jdubois]

@NickGDev no I don't think those are big issues:

• SSL: I wouldn't use a Java-based SSL implementation anyway, for performance reasons. You can do it at the network level easily, like with an SSL Tunnel. So this isn't a blocker issue at all, as far as I'm concerned. And anyway, your app servers are supposed to be in a secured network.
• For cache providers: for the 2nd level cache, it's done by Hibernate, so we already support multiple cache provider. If we want an object cache, we will use Spring Cache, which is also independant of the cache provider, so we have no problem here.

To go back to HazelCast vs Infinispan:

• The HTTP session clustering worry me, but anyway only HazelCast has support for an HTTP filter, which is the only way for us to be cross-container. So it's the only way to go.
• As far as I'm concerned HazelCast looks good, and has better performance, so I'd like to keep it as our main implementation. We could add Infinspan, but there's work to do, so this will be another option in the generator, that can be added later when we have time.

[jdubois]

We will wait until Spring Boot 1.3 is released, as it has Inifispan support: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/blob/master/spring-boot-autoconfigure/src/main/java/org/springframework/boot/autoconfigure/cache/InfinispanCacheConfiguration.java

I'm marking this as closed, as this is an unreleased version, and we will have a migration path to follow first.

[jgasmi]

Any news regarding Infinispan and when it will be included in the generator ?

[jdubois]

It won't be included anytime soon:

• Nobody has expressed any interest in it
• Hazelcast is working great, and we are even more thightly integrated with it in our microservices approach, and the end result just awesome!

[deepu105]

You can add it with a Jhipster module if you want btw On 21 Mar 2016 04:42, "Julien Dubois" notifications@github.com wrote:

It won't be included anytime soon:

• Nobody has expressed any interest in it
• Hazelcast is working great, and we are even more thightly integrated with it in our microservices approach, and the end result just awesome!

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[jgasmi]

My only concerns with Hazelcast are regarding HTTP session clustering and the license behind that.

[deepu105]

What concern? On 21 Mar 2016 19:47, "Jamel Gasmi" notifications@github.com wrote:

My only concerns with Hazelcast are regarding HTTP session clustering and the license behind that.

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[jgasmi]

That the HTTP Session clustering is not open source. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[NickGDev-zz]

it's available in the OSS code base but the documentation states, that particular feature falls under the enterprise license...

"Tomcat Session Replication in Hazelcast Enterprise is a Hazelcast Module where the state of each created HttpSessionObject is kept in the Hazelcast Distributed Map"

https://hazelcast.com/use-cases/web-session-clustering/tomcat-web-session-replication/

Hazelcast is great but I raised a similar concerns regarding their security module being silently switched to enterprise in newer releases

*further clarification from latest 3.6 release: http://docs.hazelcast.org/docs/3.6/manual/html-single/images/HazelcastArchitecture.png http://goo.gl/2hD4sM

[deepu105]

Really :O this needs to be investigated. cc @jdubois On 21 Mar 2016 20:41, "Nick" notifications@github.com wrote:

it's available in the OSS code base but the documentation states, that particular feature falls under the enterprise license...

"Tomcat Session Replication in Hazelcast Enterprise is a Hazelcast Module where the state of each created HttpSessionObject is kept in the Hazelcast Distributed Map"

https://hazelcast.com/use-cases/web-session-clustering/tomcat-web-session-replication/

Hazelcast is great but I raised a similar concerns regarding their security module being silently switched to enterprise in newer releases

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[deepu105]

Ok this is available as open source as well http://hazelcast.org/use-cases/clustering/

Cc @jdubois

[jdubois]

We already had an answer from @gregrluck saying it would stay Open Source, that's good enough for me.