I recently spoke at the excellent DevNexus 2013 conference, which took place in Atlanta,  Georgia. Below are my presentations. You can find example code here.

Developing polyglot persistence applications

NoSQL databases such as Redis, MongoDB and Cassandra are emerging as a compelling choice for many applications. They can simplify the persistence of complex data models and offer significantly better scalability and performance. However, using a NoSQL database means giving up the benefits of the relational model such as SQL, constraints and ACID transactions. For some applications, the solution is polyglot persistence: using SQL and NoSQL databases together.

In this talk, you will learn about the benefits and drawbacks of polyglot persistence and how to design applications that use this approach. We will explore the architecture and implementation of an example application that uses MySQL as the system of record and Redis as a very high-performance database that handles queries from the front-end. You will learn about mechanisms for maintaining consistency across the various databases.

Decomposing applications for scalability and deployability

Today, there are several trends that are forcing application architectures to evolve. Users expect a rich, interactive and dynamic user experience on a wide variety of clients including mobile devices. Applications must be highly scalable, highly available and run on cloud environments. Organizations often want to frequently roll out updates, even multiple times a day. Consequently, it’s no longer adequate to develop simple, monolithic web applications that serve up HTML to desktop browsers.

In this talk we describe the limitations of a monolithic architecture. You will learn how to use the scale cube to decompose your application into a set of narrowly focused, independently deployable back-end services and an HTML 5 client. We will also discuss the role of technologies such as NodeJS and AMQP brokers. You will learn how a modern PaaS such as Cloud Foundry simplifies the development and deployment of this style of application.

Developing applications with Cloud Services

Cloud computing isn’t just about application deployment. There are also a growing number of cloud-based web services that you can use to develop your application. One of the most well known is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. But there are many others including web services for messaging, relational and NoSQL databases, email and telephony. Using these services allows you to build highly scalable applications without the pain and cost of having to develop and operate your own infrastructure.

In this presentation, you will learn about the benefits and drawbacks of these Web services; their typical use cases and how to use them. We will describe a location aware, telephony application that is built using cloud services such as twilio.com and factual.com. You will learn about strategies for building resilient, fault tolerant applications that consume cloud services.