Bela Ban completed his PhD at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. After some time at IBM Research, he did a post-doc at Cornell. Then he worked on NMS/EMS for Fujitsu Network Communications in San Jose, California. In 2003, he joined JBoss to work full-time on open source. Bela manages the Clustering Team at JBoss and created and leads the JGroups project.

Bela's interests include network protocols, performance, group communication, trail running, biking and beerathlon. When not hacking code he spends time with his family.

LOCATION: Zürich
KEYWORDS: Concept, Product, Technology

SPEAKER: Bela Ban   COMPANY: JBoss - a division of Red Hat

In the default clustering configuration, JBoss uses IP multicasting for discovery and message sending. However, most clouds currently don't provide IP multicasting, so JBoss nodes run in the default clustering configuration won't be able to form a cluster in the cloud. (This can be changed by passing a simple system property to run.sh).

We'll discuss how to configure a JBoss cluster to use TCP instead of IP multicasting. Specifically, we'll look at using (1) a static configuration (including a list of server addresses), (2) an external lookup service or (3) S3 to discovery the cluster nodes.

To understand how this works, we'll take a look under the cover of JBoss clustering, at the transport and discovery protocols of the JGroups framework, and discuss the pros and cons of the 3 options above.

Finally, we'll also discuss the knobs we can adjust to speed up a cloud based cluster.

LANGUAGE: Talk: en / Slides: en

Bela Ban completed his PhD at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. After some time at IBM Research, he did a post-doc at Cornell. Then he worked on NMS/EMS for Fujitsu Network Communications in San Jose, California. In 2003, he joined JBoss to work full-time on open source. Bela manages the Clustering Team at JBoss and created and leads the JGroups project.

Bela's interests include network protocols, performance, group communication, trail running, biking and beerathlon. When not hacking code he spends time with his family.

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