How niche is that?

CloudTran (previously known as CloudSave) addresses scalable transactions in the cloud – which may sound pretty arcane and boring. And to me too - I was always the first to fall asleep when transactions started being discussed!

I now believe that transactions in the cloud-style environments – multiple machines in a high-speed grid – will be key to making clouds mainstream for application programmers using Java or .NET. The “multi-machine” approach to building systems is becoming the fashionable choice because :

• applications are getting bigger, more sophisticated and interconnected. Many applications now have millions of users online
• you can increase capacity in smaller increments
• performance – 1,000 modern machines could easily have 8TB of main memory and 8,000 CPU cores. This is becoming standard rather than supercomputer level;
• there will always come a point at which a single machine runs out of capacity.

In other words, this niche is likely to become mainstream - if we can just save our data. The "distributed data/transaction" problem is also not just a niche problem: at the low end, the problem hits when there is more than one machine operating on data - simple transactions based on a single connection to the database won't work. We can even extend the niche to single-machine applications where non-stop reliability, maximum performance or sustained high performance during demand are important. A new general-purpose architecture that works for one machine or 1,000 would come in handy - especially if it's relatively easy for application programmers to get on board. Cloud transactions are what we need to make enterprise programs work in the Cloud quickly and easily.