JBoss' Manik Surtani provides an overview of the scope and capabilities of the Infinispan open source data grid platform, along with usage examples and a brief tour of the APIs. An upcoming second part will take a deep-dive into the architecture, more advanced APIs and extending Infinispan.

Gearman is a tool for distributing processing jobs over one or more machines. This article explains how to use Gearman in PHP applications to handle better the load of busy sites or applications that need to execute heavy jobs.

I have attended a presentation by Simon Guest from Microsoft on their cloud computing architecture. Although there was no new concept or idea introduced, Simon has provided an excellent summary on the major patterns of doing cloud computing. I have to admit that I am not familiar with Azure and this is my first time hearing a Microsoft cloud computing presentation. I felt Microsoft has explained their Azure platform in a very comprehensible way. I am quite impressed. Simon talked about 5 patterns of Cloud computing. Let me summarize it (and mix-in a lot of my own thoughts) ...