You don't know how much you'd miss an O/C mapper till you get one

When we started moving our enterprise app toward Windows Azure, we quickly realized that scalable enterprise cloud apps were tough to develop, real tough.

Windows Azure wasn’t at fault here, quite the opposite actually, but the cloud computing paradigm itself is tough to develop enterprise apps. Indeed, scalability in enterprise apps can’t be solved by just pilling up tons of memcached servers.

Enterprise apps aren’t about scaling out some super-simplistic webap (like twitter.com) to a billion users who will be performing reads 99.9% of the time, but rather scaling out complex business logic and accordingly complex business data along.

This lead us to implement Lokad.Cloud, an open source .NET O/C mapper (object-to-cloud) much similar in the spirit to O/R mapper such as NHibernate but tailored for NoSQL storage.

I am proud to announce that Lokad.Cloud has reached its v1.0 milestone.

As a matter of fact, you’ve probably never heard of O/C mappers, so I will explain why relying a decent O/C mapper should be a primary concern for any ambitious cloud app developer.

To illustrate the point, I am going to list a few subtleties that arise as soon you start using the Queue Storage. As far cloud apps are concerned, Queue Storage is one of the most powerful and most handy abstraction to achieve true scale out behaviors.

Microsoft provides the StorageClient which is basically a .NET wrapper around the REST API offered by the Queue Storage. Let see how an O/C mapper implemented on top of the StorageClient can make queues even better:

I have only illustrated here a few point about Queue Storage, but Blob Storage, Table Storage, Management API, Performance Monitoring, …  also need to rely on higher level abstractions as offered by an O/C mapper such as Lokad.Cloud to become fluently usable.

Don’t waste any more time crippling your business logic with cloud contingencies, and start using some O/C mapper. I suggest Lokad.Cloud, but I admit this is biased viewpoint.


Reader Comments (2)

I might have a biased viewpoint too (:D), but I have to say that Lokad.Cloud really brings Azure Storage to an excellent level. Thanks for making it free and open-source! March 10, 2010 | Dario Solera