O/C mapper - object to cloud

When we started to port our forecasting technology toward the cloud, we decided to create a new open source project called Lokad.Cloud that would isolate all the pieces of our cloud infrastructure that weren’t specific of Lokad.

The project has been initially subtitled Lokad.Cloud - .NET execution framework for Windows Azure, as the primary goal of this project was to provide some cloud equivalent of the plain old Windows Services. We did quickly end-up with QueueServices which happens to be quite handy to design horizontally scalable apps.

But more recently, the project has taken a new orientation, becoming more and more an O/C mapper (object to cloud) inspired by the terminology used by O/R mappers. When it comes to horizontal scaling, a key idea is that data and data processing cannot be considered in isolation anymore.

With classic client-server apps, persistence logic is not supposed to invade your core business logic. Yet, when your business logic happens to become so intensive that it must be distributed, you end-up in a very cloudy situation where data and data processing becomes closely coupled in order to achieve horizontal scalability.

That, being said, close coupling between data and data processing isn’t doomed to be an ugly mess. We have found that obsessively object-oriented patterns applied to Blob Storage can made the code both elegant and readable.

Lokad.Cloud is entering its beta stage with the release of the 0.2.x series.