Application Grid

Back at BEAWorld in 2006, BEA introduced the concept of “microServices Architecture”, which involved modularizing the internals of WebLogic Server and taking advantage of the OSGi standard. The WebLogic Server team has continued to make great progress in modularization ever since then, bringing significant benefit to installation, startup, and component updates. In short, by installing only what you need, you minimize resource footprint and startup time while enabling incremental updates that are fast and reliable. This is important for any use of an application server, but it is particularly beneficial in an application grid environment because it means that the grid’s dynamic adjustment of an application’s capacity can happen in even more finely-grained increments (if your app doesn’t use JMS, your grid is not wasting the cycles and footprint of installing and starting it when adding a node to a cluster, for example). Gavin Clarke over at The Register has some comments in a write-up on this based on a recent OpenWorld session.