Introducing SpaceDeck

SpaceDeck, GigaSpaces new User Interface, is now fully available for use in our Smart DIH product via Kubernetes installation.

SpaceDeck is an intuitive, streamlined user interface to manage and control the GigaSpaces environment.

Using SpaceDeck, you can define the tools to bring legacy System of Record (SoR) databases into the in-memory data grid that is the core of the GigaSpaces system.

SpaceDeck includes the following features:

• Admin: Provides security authentication, user management and connection via IDP.

• Spaces: displays status, monitoring and resource usage of Spaces and related partitions.

• Data Sources: specifies the data source that will be used to provide data in a data pipeline.

  Data Pipeline: displays data pipeline details such as monitoring, source table/s in the System of Record, resulting Object in GigaSpaces, and parameters of the data connection. Also allows quick one-click creation of new data pipelines.

• Services: used for creating and testing queries via JDBC v3 format and creating services out of it. Create service will deploy a REST service that will ruin the query. For use in client services, which are applications that interact with Spaces.

• Data Query: querying the data using SQL commands, supporting full ANSI SQL-99 syntax.

Data Integration (DI) Layer

Introducing the Data Integration (DI) layer, which is a vital part of the Digital Integration Hub (DIH) platform. DI is the gateway for incoming data into the Data Integration Hub (DIH) system. This is deployed via Kubernetes only. The DI components are delivered as part of the GigaSpaces DIH Package. DI contains four components which are responsible for reading and analyzing Kafka messages and for pushing them into the Space. DI is responsible for a wide range of data integration tasks as ingesting data in batches or streaming data changes. DI integrates with Oracle and MSSQL databases. It also contains the IBM Infosphere Data Replication (IIDR) which is a connector engine for data pipelines.

SQL Over Nested Objects Search

Our JDBC V3 now allows querying complex objects (hierarchical objects) using our standard extended SQL. This extended SQL lets the user refer to document or POJO fields in different levels of hierarchy, within arrays and Java collections, from a standard SQL query.

Smart DIH Installation via Kubernetes

GigaSpaces Smart DIH can now be easily installed on a Kubernetes cluster. Smart DIH is built as a Kubernetes native platform which leverages Kubernetes strengths such as scalability, smart orchestration, easy cloud deployment. All three layers of SmartDIH - from the DI (Data Integration), through to the in-memory data grid (IMDG), and the data services - are built as multi-pod platforms that allow native Kubernetes installation, orchestration and scale. The full Smart DIH package is delivered as one Kubernetes Umbrella that can be deployed on any Kubernetes cluster.

 For more information visit the Smart DIH Orchestration: Kubernetes and Smart DIH Kubernetes Installation pages.

Smart Cache & Smart DIH - New Features

Our Kubernetes support has been enhanced to support more features, adapt to cloud deployments, and extend the Custom Resource Definition of a PU (Processing Unit). For more information about these features, please contact our customer support team.

These feature enhancements include:

• Handling in-memory space backups using zone topology

• Allowing the setting of additional custom resources next to the PU, without overriding the PU state

• Handling Helm install upgrade and delete abnormal scenarios

• Aligning to Kubernetes concepts by streamline usage of properties, probes etc

• Recovery from inconsistent and erroneous state of workloads by introducing timeouts and recovery flows

• Enhancing Tiered storage configuration

1. Express Upload. For Smart DIH as-a-Service customers only.  For additional details, please contact our Customer Support team.

• Our SpaceDeck UI now offers a far simpler user journey using the new Express Upload option.

• The advantages of this are exemplified by users having a quicker and simpler user experience by being fully self-service whilst using common standards of data migration to create data services.

• This features supports the basic importing of data into GigaSpaces Smart DIH as-a-Service platform from standard data formats of .csv or .json files. This data can be imported from an Amazon S3 bucket. Using this data, through SpaceDeck, a Data Source can be defined as well as a Space, and a new Pipeline can be created and schemas/tables selected . After the data setup and configuration, queries can be run and services created.

2. Stream SQL

   GigaSpaces has added the ability to bring data not only from relational database but rather from Kafka directly using StreamSQL. For information about using Stream SQL in SpaceDeck refer to the StreamSQL Overview and StreamSQL Implementation pages..

3. There is now no need to manually configure IIDR subscription via the DI Subscription Manager as this is now performed automatically. For more information refer to Pipeline Setup Via Subscription Manager and SpaceDeck.

Services

Through our SpaceDeck UI, low code development of data micro-services provide our clients with the ability to deploy and execute data services efficiently.  

For additional details about Service Creator refer to Deploying Services

In some cases, services can return multiple rows from a Space. In order to avoid all the data being displayed on one long page, which is not practical we have introduced pagination which allows the data to be divided into smaller, more manageable pages.

Discovery of Endpoints for Viewing Documentation:

• Swagger UI for is now available for each service.

• API docs in Open API format is now available for each service.

• A regular user without permissions can only create or delete a service as this function is currently created and stored on the UI server side only.

• In order to deploy or undeploy a service, the user will require Manage Service permission, as these operations make backend calls. Refer to the SpaceDeck Services page for more details.

• Refer to Security Overview for more details.

• Service Monitoring - For each deployed service, there is monitoring supplied through SpaceDeck.

• Download Service Logs - Service logs can now be downloaded from SpaceDeck.

• Update Log Level - The ability to update the log level through Postman or CURL.

• Only relevant actions are presented for any given state. For example, there is no delete option displayed for a deployed service.

Integrations

GigaSpaces have a supported reference integration with AWS API Gateway to register a query service. Additional reference integrations will be added in the future.

SpaceDeck Enhancements

Through SpaceDeck you can now view information about specific hosts. In addition, single or multiple logs can be generated. Hosts can be used to monitor the health of all your hosts to ensure that if limits are being reached, there is an opportunity to reorganize data or increase the amount of RAM or nodes.

SpaceDeck for Smart Cache

SpaceDeck is now available for the first time for Smart Cache installations that use Kubernetes orchestration. In the future there will be more features added. For a reminder of which UIs are used for which operations refer to our Platform Feature Access page.

The features currently available are:

• Security: Authentication, Authorization and Roles Management.

• Hosts: This menu displays specific hosts information and can be used to generate logs.

• Spaces: Deploy, undeploy and view dynamic metrics of Spaces.

• Data Query: Execute SQL queries against the data in the Space.

Redo Log Update

Redo capabilities now include the ability to flush the redo log to disk upon shutdown.

Disclaimers

• Self-signed certificate has been removed in favor of the BouncyCastle package (org.bouncycastle v1.50) which is now bundled with the product.  Due to the missing "sun.security.provider.Sun" in the newer JDK versions, users of IBM JDK are required to have this package in the classpath. For more information, refer to Securing the Transport Layer.

• ASM (Java bytecode manipulation framework): Until version 16.3.0, GigaSpacesbundles ASM v3.3.1.

  Starting with ASM v4.0, there was a breaking change made to their API, specifically converting interfaces to classes, e.g., ClassVisitor and Method Visitor.

  In GigaSpaces15.2, the bundle was updated to include ASM v9.5, mainly to support future upgrades to Java 11. For more information refer to Third-Party License Agreements