Ari Zilka, Founder, Terracotta

Ari Zilka founded Terracotta in 2003, where he currently serves as the infrastructure software company's CTO. There he's been working to refine the software that makes it easy to scale a Java application to as many computers as needed, without the usual custom application code and databases used to share data in a cluster.

Prior to Terracotta, Ari was the Chief Architect at Walmart.com, where he led the innovation and development of the company's new engineering initiatives. While there, he built and led a team of core engineers focused on performance management, and operations cost-saving measures. Outside of Walmant.com, Ari's work in software development and consulting has had him working with Gap.com, Nike.com, Harrod's of London, Siemens, Intel, Compaq, and Barnes & Noble among others.

In June 2008, Ari and the Terracotta development team celebrated the release of the first commercially-available book about the technology, "The Definitive Guide to Terracotta: Cluster the JVM for Spring, Hibernate and POJO Scalability". The book was written for both developers and architects who want to learn the "whats, wheres, whens, and whys" of the Terracotta scaling engine.

Ari holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Computer Science as well as in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.

Presentation: "Architecting for Performance and Scalability: Panel Discussion"

Track: Solutions Track: Performance and Scalability Track

Time: Thursday 11:00 - 12:00

Location: Concordia

Abstract: What does it take to scale? This panel will bring together leading architects and solution providers in the area of performance, scalability, fault tolerance, and clustering; the panel will explore current and emerging architectures, practices, and solutions for achieving predictable performance & scalability.

Presentation: "Terracotta: Open Source Network-attached Memory"

Track: Solutions Track: Performance and Scalability Track

Time: Thursday 13:00 - 14:00

Location: Concordia

Abstract:

In this session Ari Zilka shows you how you can get Network-Attached Memory as an appliance-like infrastructure service through Terracotta's JVM- level clustering technology (http://terracotta.org). You will learn what Network-Attached Memory is, how it works and how Terracotta can simplify the task of clustering an enterprise application immensely by sharing the heap of the JVM underneath the application instead of clustering the application itself.

JVM-level clustering can turn single-node, multi-threaded apps into distributed, multi-node apps, often with no code changes. This is possible by plugging in to the Java Memory Model in order to maintain key Java semantics of pass-by-reference, thread coordination and garbage collection across the cluster. Terracotta enables this using only declarative configuration with minimal impact to existing code and provides fine-grained field-level replication which means your objects no longer need to implement Java serialization. This session will show how it works and how you can start clustering your POJO-based Web applications (based on Spring, Struts, Wicket, RIFE, EHCache, Quartz, Lucene, DWR, Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty or Geronimo etc.).