Emad Benjamin

Chief Technologist, Application Platforms, VMware

Emad Benjamin

Emad has spent the past 25 years in various software engineering positions involving software development of application platforms and distributed systems for various industries such as finance, health, IT, and heavy industry – in various international locations. Emad is currently the Sr. Director and Chief Technologist of Application Platforms with Office of the CTO at VMware, focusing on building hybrid cloud distributed runtimes that are application aware.

Presentations

Microservices what a Servicemesh - The sequel. It is not just about cloud, it is about time

Thursday, 1:30 PM EST

Come to this session to learn about how we solved a fairly complex problem associated with maintaining predictable response time across set of service calls that are spread across multiple clouds. Many over the past few years have embraced microservices based architectures to increase flexibility and speed of feature delivery.

However, with this comes the challenge of maintaining consistent performance, scale, and good response times, in this session we will talk about a specialized controller that we have written called Predictable Response Time Controller (PRTC) to help with the challenges of maintaining scale and response times.

The Hybrid Cloud Runtime and the Rise of Application Platforms

Thursday, 3:15 PM EST

We often meet customers that have migrated to the public cloud only to later determine that some of their critical legacy application patterns have transitioned to a public cloud implementation, and they are now paying higher costs due to this design flaw. Regardless of cloud location, what really matters is how well you have abstracted the application platform nature of your enterprise workloads. If you don’t understand your application workloads in terms of scalability, performance, reliability, security, and overall management, then you are simply shifting the problem from one cloud to another.

IT practitioners are bringing their old habits to new problems. The key to this problem is deeply rooted in the knowledge gap that exists between development and operations organizations. In this session, we talk about the notion of the application platform and its teachings to close the gap that exists between developers and infrastructure architects. At the most fundamental level you can think of application platforms as an abstraction of three major parts: 1) application code logic; 2) application runtime where the code runs; and 3) infrastructure abstractions such as CaaS, K8s, and fundamental IaaS. We will also cover the notion of the Hybrid Cloud Runtime (HCR) as a common control plane that will help in getting a common observability across such multi cloud distributed applications. At the most fundamental level HCR is made of Servicemesh, and a set of application runtime aware controllers to manage SLA and help SREs optimize their day-to-day interactions with such systems.

Books

Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms (VMware Press Technology)

by Emad Benjamin

Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms (VMware Press Technology)

  • Virtualizing and Tuning Large-Scale Java Platforms

     

    Technical best practices and real-world tips for optimizing enterprise Java applications on VMware vSphere®

     

    Enterprises no longer ask, “Can Java be virtualized”? Today, they ask, “Just how large can we scale virtualized Java application platforms, and just how efficiently can we tune them?” Now, the leading expert on Java virtualization answers these questions, offering detailed technical information you can apply in any production or QA/test environment.

     

    Emad Benjamin has spent nine years virtualizing VMware’s own enterprise Java applications and working with nearly 300 leading VMware customers on projects of all types and sizes—from 100 JVMs to 10,000+, with heaps from 1GB to 360GB, and including massive big-data applications built on clustered JVMs. Reflecting all this experience, he shows you how to successfully size and tune any Java workload.

     

    This reference and performance “cookbook” identifies high-value optimization opportunities that apply to physical environments, virtual environments, or both. You learn how to rationalize and scale existing Java infrastructure, modernize architecture for new applications, and systematically benchmark and improve every aspect of virtualized Java performance. Throughout, Benjamin offers real performance studies, specific advice, and “from-the-trenches” insights into monitoring and troubleshooting.

     

    Coverage includes

    --Performance issues associated with large-scale Java platforms, including consolidation, elasticity, and flexibility

    --Technical considerations arising from theoretical and practical limits of Java platforms

    --Building horizontal in-memory databases with VMware vFabric SQLFire to improve scalability and response times

    --Tuning large-scale Java using throughput/parallel GC and Concurrent Mark and Sweep (CMS) techniques

    --Designing and sizing a new virtualized Java environment

    --Designing and sizing new large-scale Java platforms when migrating from physical to virtualized deployments

    --Designing and sizing large-scale Java platforms for latency-sensitive in-memory databases

    --Real-world performance studies: SQLFire vs. RDBMS, Spring-based Java web apps, vFabric SpringTrader, application tiers, data tiers, and more

    --Performance differences between ESXi3, 4.1, and 5

    --Best-practice considerations for each type of workload: architecture, performance, design, sizing, and high availability

    --Identifying bottlenecks in the load balancer, web server, Java application server, or DB Server tiers

    --Advanced vSphere Java performance troubleshooting with esxtop

    --Performance FAQs: answers to specific questions enterprise customers have asked

     

     


Enterprise Java Applications Architecture on VMware

by Emad Benjamin

Enterprise Java Applications Architecture on VMware
  • This book is the culmination of 7 years of experience in running Java on VMware vSphere both internally at VMware and at VMware customer sites. In fact many of VMware’s customers run critical enterprise Java applications on VMware vSphere where they have achieved better TCO, and SLAs. This book covers high level architecture and implementation details, such as design and sizing, high availability designs, automation of deployments, best practices, tuning, and troubleshooting techniques.