Indians on par with US s/w developers

BANGALORE, INDIA: As the Indian market for software developers is touted to rise in the coming years, the scope and space has been consistently broadening for Indian software developers.

From open source to software testing, the Indian software developers are at par with the global developer community.

Indian software developers prefer Orkut

Recently, Terracotta, a leader in infrastructure software for enterprise Java high availability and scalability, expanded its India presence and is looking at a talented software developer pool with expertise in Java and open source.

In an interaction with CIOL, Amit Pandey, CEO, Terracotta said, " We are very happy with the talent level in our Indian office and the people we hire in India are every bit as good as the people we hire in the US or Europe."

Pandey also talked about Teracotta’s solutions, technology and database products, which help developers make finer grained decisions about how to share data than current-state approaches.

Excerpts from the interview:

CIOL: Can you brief our readers about Terracotta and its solutions for the software developer community?

Amit Pandey: Terracotta is an open source Java infrastructure software that allows developers to scale an application to as many computers as required, without any expensive custom code or database needed to share data among computers.

Terracotta clusters Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) to create a shared memory pool for the application tier, creating high performance and reliable scale-out. It helps reduce development efforts and dependencies on App servers and frameworks.

CIOL: What are the areas in which Terracotta is used and brief us on the architecture?

AP: Terracotta is used to:

* Reduce database expense and eliminate the scaling challenges that databases present to applications.
* Scale existing applications that pose management challenges.
* Maintain high SLAs.
* Simplify code to increase productivity.
* With Terracotta, developers can use more open source frameworks and make them enterprise class.

Some industries that implement Terracotta’s technology include, but are not limited to, reservations systems, online gaming, portals, healthcare, and telecom.

Terracotta hooks right into each JVM in a group of servers and watches for changes in and access to very fine-grained portions of each Java Virtual Machine's memory or "heap."

The ability to hook into a JVM directly gives Terracotta unparalleled insight into what is changing in the JVM’s memory and which logical threads in the application are accessing and changing certain parts of that memory. With this information, Terracotta establishes a map of collective memory of an arbitrary number of servers in a cluster, and synchronizes their access to this shared memory map or pool.

Terracotta is different as it selectively clusters the JVM itself, and as a result, whatever in the JVM can be clustered, with users choosing what specifically to share. This is a fundamentally different approach that radically simplifies making mission-critical Java applications highly available and scalable.

MySQL becoming more attractive in India

CIOL: How is the Terracotta open source software different from the Enterprise Edition software?

AP: There are no differences in the core server functionality between the OSS and the Enterprise Edition. The Enterprise edition gives enterprise customers the support, certification and advanced management tools needed to run business-critical production applications.

CIOL: Why has Terracotta opened a development center in India? Talent?

AP: We were very impressed with a couple of people in India who wanted to contribute code to Terracotta and we eventually ended up offering a job to one of them. Soon after that we started seeing more and more very talented Java developers who were interested in working for Terracotta and that prompted us to start an office in India.

CIOL: How often do you come across Indian software developers with domain expertise in open source development?

AP: Most people that we hire in India don’t have much experience in writing OSS code. However, they have good software and Java expertise, and that is what is very important to us. We are very happy with the talent level of our Indian office. The people we are hiring in India are every bit as good as the people we hire in the US or Europe.

CIOL: How does Terracotta’s infrastructure software solve a fundamental problem in the market; scaling mission-critical Java applications, while reducing the need for expensive database licenses?

AP: Terracotta allows developers to make finer grained decisions about how to share data than current-state approaches. Without Terracotta, many applications O/R-map or otherwise store Java objects in a relational database. Removing the database dependency in such cases is one way Terracotta simplifies application architecture and development.

The image depicts, there is database server and an application cluster with three servers. The database should be the size of the dashed black cylinder but it is not only storing System of Record data (labeled SoR in the diagram).

It is also working to co-ordinate between application servers. The application's scratch data is causing the database to get too big for our needs, and costs begin to escalate.

The red arrows depict the database swelling due to an overload of scratch data.

CIOL: Who are your major competitors?

AP: Our biggest competition comes from the database vendors such as Oracle. We offload the database so end up displacing database revenues.

We are also often compared with Oracle’s Coherence software (formerly Tangosol), which is a distributed cache. In most use cases, Terracotta is much faster and almost always much easier to implement.