Microsoft project “Velocity”

Thursday September the 4th I gave a presentation for DotNed about Velocity, the framework to enable distributed cache on the Windows platform. It was a fun evening for me with lots of great questions from the audience. You can download the slides from the site.

There were a few questions that I couldn’t answer though. **Regions 
**I know assumptions are the mother of all censored, but I made the assumption that regions aren’t being replicated across hosts but stay in one host. It’s not entirely untrue, but it is a little more complex though.

When you specify a region in configuration or in the .Put() method calls, all objects in that region won’t get replicated or partitioned across hosts but will stay on a single host, also called a node. However if you don’t specify a region explicitly, the objects will get spread across nodes. However, Velocity will still create regions. And that’s what we were wondering about during the course where I explained I didn’t fully understood what was going on there. Well, the regions being created will (or might) hold a copy of your object and this way your object will get partitioned across hosts and preferably across machines. What about security? Velocity enabled caching on enterprise scale, resulting in a cache distributed over possible hundreds of machines, accessed by a great number of applications. In CTP1 there’s no way to secure your data, which is likely a problem for a number of scenarios. The team just posted that for version 1 of Velocity they’re going to implement application level security using token level security and/or take the applicationid/siteid from ASP.NET to use that to secure access. Read more in this thread on the forums.

Still only 38 days, 16 hours and 37 minutes to PDC, hope to hear more about Velocity there.