Abiquo Enhances Cloud Management with Akka for Scalable and Concurrent Applications
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Product
- Typesafe’s Akka
- Rabbit/MQ
Tech Stack
- Java
- Scala
- C++
- Adobe Flex
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
- Remote Control
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Abiquo is a leading enterprise cloud management software company that enables organizations to manage a globally deployed computing infrastructure through a single interface. The platform supports unlimited physical and cloud resources, including private, public, and hybrid clouds. Abiquo's solution allows users to select from six market-leading hypervisors and customize storage solutions, network providers, and other technologies. The platform is primarily written in Java, with C++ components for integrating with open-source hypervisor APIs, and features a rich Adobe Flex-based user interface. Abiquo's customers benefit from reduced costs and complexity in managing virtual IT environments while maintaining control over physical infrastructure and gaining agility in changing hypervisors.
The Challenge
Abiquo faced a significant challenge with its cloud provisioning platform, which was unable to handle unpredictable scaling demands effectively. The system's massive configurability, initially a strength, became a bottleneck as it hit peak throughput at relatively low loads. The central issue was the synchronous calls made by the Abiquo Node to the Virtualization Factory, which handled the configuration of end-users' virtual environments. These calls were slow, creating a bottleneck and leaving users without status updates during the creation of virtual environments, leading to confusion and dissatisfaction.
The Solution
To address the scalability issue, Abiquo's team, led by Senior Engineer Albert Puig, opted for a message-based solution using Rabbit/MQ and Typesafe’s Akka middleware. Akka, a toolkit for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant applications, was integrated with Rabbit/MQ to facilitate asynchronous calls and parallel execution. This approach allowed Abiquo to refactor its system, utilizing Akka's actor-based model to manage hypervisor-specific tasks concurrently. The integration of Akka and Rabbit/MQ was seamless due to Akka's built-in AMQP support, enabling easy interaction with Rabbit/MQ messages. The new architecture, featuring a supervisor actor and dynamic pools of hypervisor actors, provided the necessary scalability and improved user feedback during virtual environment creation.
Operational Impact
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Infosys achieves a 5–7 percent effort reduction across projects
Infosys, a global leader in consulting, technology, and outsourcing solutions, was facing significant challenges in application development and maintenance due to its distributed teams, changing business priorities and the need to stay in alignment with customer needs. The company used a mix of open source, home-grown and third-party applications to support application development projects. However, challenges resulting from distributed teams using manual processes increased as the company grew. It became more and more important for Infosys to execute its projects efficiently, so they could improve quality, reduce defects and minimize delays.
Case Study
Arctic Wolf Envelops Teamworks with 24x7 Cybersecurity Protection and Comprehensive Visibility
Teamworks, a leading athlete engagement platform, faced rising cyberthreats and needed enhanced visibility into its network, servers, and laptops. With software developers connecting from all over the world, the company sought to improve its security posture and position itself for future growth. The company had a secure platform but recognized the need for a more proactive solution to identify gaps within its technology infrastructure. Data exfiltration and malicious access were top concerns, prompting the need for a comprehensive security upgrade.
Case Study
Sawback IT and Datto Save Client From a Costly Mistake
Ballistic Echo, a software development house, faced a critical challenge when human error led to the deletion of thousands of lines of unique code. This incident occurred before the code was pushed to source control, resulting in significant loss of time, revenue, and work. The previous file-level backup solution they used was slow and inefficient, making it nearly impossible to manually recreate the lost work. The need for a more reliable and efficient business continuity solution became evident to avoid such disasters in the future.
Case Study
Opal Helps Customers Shine Thanks to Datto
SP Flooring & Design Center faced a ransomware attack that encrypted and locked their files. The attack was initiated through a compromised service account set up by an outside vendor. The ransomware infection was isolated quickly, but there was a concern about the extent of the data at risk. The company had backups in place but was unsure of how much information was compromised. The situation required immediate action to prevent further damage and restore the affected data.
Case Study
Zapier Aggregates Multiple Analytics in a Single Dashboard with the New Relic Platform
Zapier, a company that enables non-technical users to push data between hundreds of web applications, was facing a challenge in automating and provisioning servers for optimal performance. The company's environment consisted of 50 Linux servers on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a Django application split across several servers, and a backend consisting of a dynamic number of celery task workers fed by messages published to a RabbitMQ cluster. They also maintained a number of internal web services on nginx in front of Gunicorn and Node.js processes. Redis handled simple key and value stores, with logging handled by Graylog2 and ElasticSearch. However, they realized that no level of automation would be sufficient without an effective monitoring solution in place. They needed a tool that could provide immediate alerts when something was breaking and could be easily implemented into their environment.
Case Study
Pipeline Insight Case Study: YARCDATA
YarcData faced challenges in determining the conversion rates of prospects into customers through various marketing efforts and identifying the source of its leads. They wanted to know the percentage of opportunities in the sales pipeline that came from different marketing events, web downloads, or self-sourced sales opportunities. Additionally, they needed the ability to drill down into the data to guide where to allocate more marketing dollars based on the success of previous efforts. Previously, YarcData relied heavily on spreadsheets and Salesforce.com reports, which made it difficult to extract the exact information they needed. This reliance on spreadsheets represented about 70% of their data presentation.
