Is your code cloud-ready and multi-core friendly? (part 1): Introduction

With the advent of cloud computing, the explosion in mobile devices and the growing availability of multi-core CPUs, there is a drive toward new models of how we design and develop code. Well, they’re not new really. Some of the models have been  around, and in use, but they are not typically practiced by mainstream developers…yet.

Michael blogged about this trend in his blog post “Microsoft says you need to change how you are building your applications.” You should pop over and read the whole post, but here is part of what he said:

“I was surprised how many speakers [at Microsoft TechEd 2008] were conveying the same message: 

‘CPU speeds are topping out.  If you want your applications to run faster and better you are going to have to build your applications in a new way.  The solution isn’t just to learn how to multi-thread your applications.  The solution lies in building your applications into smaller units of code called tasks that can be moved around to the different cores of a multi-core machine.’

Following that up, Michael quoted Bill Gates’ keynote speech and added his own comment:

The… ‘need to take programs and break them down into parallel execution units now becomes absolutely necessary.’

This statement was music to my ears.  Why?  It is the same model that we have been using for fabric computing since our beginnings in 2001.  Now we are starting to see this message more and more as cloud computing is gaining acceptance.”

For our code to meet the demands of computing in a cloud-based, multi-core world, we’ll need to design our code with the following attributes in mind:

· Atomicity

· Statelessness

· Idempotence

· Parallelism

· Reaping the Benefits

That’s a mouthful. In a continuing series, we will examine what each means and what it gets us.