At JAX London, John took attendees on a journey where he explained that developers and architects need to consider the fundamentals if they want to design a truly scalable enterprise. That includes understanding the importance of network throughput, packet size, memory allocation and read write speeds. Only then can businesses deliver on a highly scalable architecture for a real-time data-driven future.

1. Architecting for a
Scalable Enterprise

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PROBLEMS DON’T CHANGE, THEY JUST GET BIGGER
I’ve been working for 30 years now and I just see the same
problems over and over again - History repeating itself
It’s true we have some new ones but they’re just
reincarnations of the old ones
You could argue that IoT, social media & eCommerce are all
new (since I started anyway) but the problems are the
same…
Massive volumes of data
It needs parsing, filtering, sorting, analysing, alerts, triggers, reporting,
compliance… Same ol’ same ol’

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30-ISH YEARS AGO
I can remember in 1987 we re-wrote a trading system
in Objective-C
In those days there was a “war” between Objective-C and C++
History tells us C++ won but it wasn’t a clear victory as Apple shows us
today
Anyway, one of the problems we had was loading in all
of the exchange rates as the system started up
We used 80386s (the latest 32 bit CPU)
The big machines had 1MB (yes 1 mega bytes) of RAM
WAN was a 2400 baud modem (2.4k bits ber second)
Network was 1MB token-ring (40k/sec on a good day)
20MB hard-disk on the top machines (80ms access time)

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SOUND FAMILIAR?
Hundreds of currency pairs (USD/GBP) - remember pre-Euro so more
currencies
A dozen forward rates (spot, 1 week, 1 month etc.)
Several changes per second (coming down the modem @ 2400 baud)
These are some of the problems we faced…
When the machines started up in the morning it
took along time to get the current snap-shot to the trader’s machines
Each new rate (GBP/USD=1.68750) took a long time to update on the
clients machines, something do to the new Object Oriented model we’d
used
Querying the data was slow
Storing and querying the historic data presented serious issues

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HARDWARE TO THE RESCUE!
You could do in a few seconds on an iPhone what took a day
to do in those days but that’s thanks to the hardware changes
NOT THE SOFTWARE
The problems and architecture remain the same, we just have
a lot more data because we’re now global
We want every trade quoted on every exchange in every
country on every trader’s desk in every office in every country
Competition has just meant that as soon as one bank does it,
you have to do better otherwise you lose the deals and go
bankrupt

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IT’S NOT JUST THE CPU
Networks speeds
20 years ago we used wired modems 38k (bits) was
good, we now expect mobile networks to give us 50+MB,
that’s >1000X
Screens
My laptop (2 years old) is 2880x1800 and “full colour”, 20 years ago
1024x768 in 16 colours was good but the real change is 3D & OpenGL etc.
Low res 3D pie charts needed a maths co-processor to display them in
under a second today we expect realistic 3D in real-time on full resolution
Today’s graphics cards are computers within computers
Memory
We used to have to page 1MB of RAM in and out (memory banks), today
we have 16GB or RAM in a laptop and 128GB of SSD on a keyring

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RAW POWER
Apollo 11’s guidance computer had just 2k
of memory and 32k of read-only storage
But it got it to the moon - and back!
Most of the time :-)
The backup was a slide rule
Today you can compress a full 1080p
movie into about 1GB and watch it on your
mobile phone
Why then do we have problems getting XML into memory?

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50 YEARS ON AND MOORE’S LAW IS STILL WITH US
His article “Cramming more components onto
integrated circuits” predicted the future of transistor
density based on a simple doubling every 2 years
Every few years we’re told this
has to end but someone comes
up with a new idea and it just
keeps going
Eventually it will flatten but it’s got a long way to go yet
so there are exciting time ahead

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SOFTWARE IS SLOWING US DOWN
Programmers are lazy, I’m one, I gave all my demos to
someone
else to write while I write these slides (thanks Iain)
We’ve added layer upon layer of abstraction to hide the
complexity and hardware - Good but it slows things down
We simplified programming with drag-n-drop
now even kindergarten kids can program
Twenty years ago Java was introduced to the
world, it took away all the problems we had
with memory management and hardware architectures
It was cool then and I think it’s still cool now but it does
have a lot of issues, many of which we can work around

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MY SLIDE FROM 2012
Today my optimisation target is Java itself

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JAVA IS VERBOSE AND SLOW
OK, don’t get offended, Java is a great language and small
applications are often as fast as C/C++, the JIT compiler is
seriously powerful
BUT
For data high volume processing, distributed computing and
analytics Java performance sucks
BUT
It is still the best we have so we just need to improve the way it
works

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GARBAGE COLLECTION
Programmers make mistakes, in the days of C/C++ it
crashed or hung the machine today it just kills the hangs
or crashes the JVM
Memory management was supposed to help but you can
bring your entire machine to a grinding halt with ease…
Concatenating Strings in a loop
Adding to a collection and forgetting to clear it
Processing too much data
The JVM and Garbage Collection doesn’t fix your bad
programming it just limits the damage is can cause
This comes at a cost too

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SERIALISATION
Java Serialisation sucks - full stop!
It’s so bad there are over 2 dozen open source frameworks to replace
it
Almost all of the In-Memory Data Grids (IMDGs) have alternatives to
native serialisation
A serialised Java object is usually larger in size than its XML equivalent
Even the process of serialisation and de-serialisation is slow, extremely
slow
We’ll come back to this later

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ANALYTICS & BIG DATA
There are essentially 4 options
Do it in memory on one machine - fast but limited size
Do it off disk on one machine - slow due to disk I/O and limited CPU
Use distributed memory - faster but not linearly faster than one
machine
Use distributed disk - fast due to more CPU but limited by disk I/O
If we could somehow improve GC, network serialisation
and disk I/O we could vastly improve on the latency
(time for results) and throughput (complexity of results)
Heard of Hadoop and Spark?

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HADOOP
To run a Hadoop query…
First understand the data you’re analysing so that you can extract it
Write some code to extract, transform and load the data into
HBase/HDFS
This can take days or weeks to code
And can take hours or days to run
Now fire up Hadoop to get your answer - more time because it’s on
disk and distributed - It’s SLOW
Make one small change and you’re back to square one
Query to result can take weeks

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SPARK
Spark is faster because it runs in memory but it still has the
overhead of Java Serialisation for distribution
There are two modes, cached and un-cached
As the name would suggest un-cached is off disk so we’re back to
serialisation costs again
Spark can use Kryo to improve serialisation, this is good but
means writing code and it’s not practical for complex data
models
Spark is an improvement on Hadoop but still limited by Java

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LET’S PARK BIG DATA FOR NOW…
We’ll come back to Spark later…

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IN THE MORE RECENT PAST…
At JAX Finance earlier this year I introduced the idea of
using binary instead of classic Java objects
This is really bringing the skills we used 20 years ago in
C and C++ back into the Java world
As long as your getter() returns the Object you
expected why should you care if it was stored in binary
or as a Java object?
This is after all the beauty of abstraction
Let’s just see what this does again…

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SAME API, JUST BINARY
Classic getter and setter vs. binary implementation
Identical API

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TIME TO ACCESS DATA…
I scaled by 1 million times simply because that’s roughly the ratio between an modern airplane and the
speed of light
Event Latency (approx.)
Scaled x 1
million
1 CPU cycle 0.3 ns (3.5 GHz) 0.3 ms (3.5 KHz)
Level 1 cache access 0.9 ns 0.9 ms
Level 2 cache access 2.8 ns 2.8 ms
Level 3 cache access 12.9 ns 12.9 ms
Main memory access (DRAM) 120 ns
120ms (1/8th
sec)
Solid-state disk I/O (SSD) 50-150 µs 50 - 150 seconds
Read 1MB sequentially from SSD 1 ms 17 minutes
Rotational Disk I/0 1-10 ms
17 mins-2.8
hours
Read 1MB sequentially from Disk 20 ms 5.6 hours
Network SF to NY (round trip) 40 ms 11 hours
Network London to Tokyo (round trip) 81 ms 1 day
Network SF to Oz (round trip) 183 ms 2 days
TCP packet retransmit 1-3 s 2-6 weeks

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COMPARING…
These two graphs show the GC pause time during
message creation and serialisation
Left is “classic” Java
Right is the binary version
The top of the right hand graph is lower than the first rung of the left
(50ms)

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SERIALISATION
Serialisation was compared (by a client) to several dozen
serialisation frameworks
The test framework can be found here:
https://github.com/eishay/jvm-serializers/
Preon was either at the top or within 5%
of the top
However the use-case was very
simple, SDOs work better with more
complex models

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SERIALISATION
Serialisation was compared (by a client) to several dozen
serialisation frameworks
The test framework can be found here:
https://github.com/eishay/jvm-serializers/
C24 is either at the top or within 5%
of the top
However the use-case was very
simple, SDOs work better with more
complex models

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SDOS & IMDGS
Performance and memory gain can be very significant
The following demonstrates different storage capacity of XML,
standard Java vs binary for storing XML (in this case FpML and ISO-
20022)
The IMDG in this specific case is Coherence but others are similar

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BINARY WITH SPARK
Compare the red (cached memory) and there’s no
difference but compare cached disk
Since binary serialisation to/from disk is almost cost-
free we see almost no degradation from disk to
memory
Using binary with disk
is about 20 times faster
than the best alternative
and less than half the
speed of cached
memory
Using binary on disk with Spark offers the volumes of
Hadoop and performance of Spark

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SO MUCH TO TALK ABOUT, SO LITTLE TIME :-
(
Spring, Groovy, C#, Go, Scala, Clojure, Swift
MicroServices, Docker, CloudFoundry
ESBs, SOA, JEE
Databases, RDBMS and NoSQL
In-Memory Data Grids (IMDGs)
Cloud
IoT
PaaS / SaaS / IaaS / YaSaaS
Virtualisation

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SPRING BOOT
Spring Boot is becoming the de facto framework for Java-
based applications
With very little else a Spring Boot application can be deployed
on a local machine, onto a server, a data centre (private cloud)
or the cloud (a data centre where you don’t know the addrsss)
Unless you’re going enterprise scale with configurable
workflow, high availability, automated scalability then it’s
difficult to justify MicroServices
Given the option we use Spring Boot with our clients and they
seem to get hooked on the simplicity and power

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MICROSERVICES
There are two types of MicroService or two main “needs”
To be able to package the entire application and deploy it in one go
To be able to manage deployment and life-cycle of large scale systems
The Java Virtual Machine with Spring Boot and Maven
(cough splutter) goes a long way to providing all the
functionality of the first need
At enterprise scale then we need more than a packaged
application - Cloud Foundry / BlueMix etc.
This is usually in the realm of the Dev Ops guys (and gals) not the
Java/Spring programmer
In a perfect world programmers need an abstractionfrom MicroServices
implementations, Spring Boot goes a long way to providing this

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TIME IS SHORT…
… but hopefully time for a few questions…
@jtdavies

30. THANK YOU!
@jtdavies