Hey, did you know that JasperFx Software is ready for formal support plans for Marten and Wolverine? Not only are we making the “Critter Stack” tools be viable long term options for your shop, we’re also interested in hearing your opinions about the tools and how they should change. We’re also certainly open to help you succeed with your software development projects on a consulting basis whether you’re using any part of the Critter Stack or some completely different .NET server side tooling.
In the continuing saga of trying to build a sustainable business model around Marten and Wolverine (the “Critter Stack”), JasperFx Software is quietly building a new set of tools code named “Critter Stack Pro” as a commercially licensed add on to the MIT-licensed OSS core tools.
While there’s some very serious progress on a potential management user interface tool for Marten & Wolverine features underway, the very first usable piece will be a new library for scaling Marten’s asynchronous projection model by much more efficiently distributing work across a clustered application than Marten by itself can today.
In the first wave of work, we’re aiming for this feature set:
- When using a single Marten database, the execution of asynchronous projections will be distributed evenly across the application cluster
- When using multiple Marten databases for multi-tenancy, the execution of asynchronous projections will be distributed by database and evenly across the application cluster
- In blue/green deployments, “Critter Stack Pro” will be able to ensure that all known versions of each projection and database are executing in a suitable “blue” or “green” node within the application cluster
- When using multiple Marten databases for multi-tenancy and also using the new dynamic tenant capability in Marten 7.0, “Critter Stack Pro” will discover the new tenant databases at runtime and redistribute projection work across the application cluster
- “First class subscriptions” of Marten events with strict ordering through any of Wolverine’s supported messaging transports (locally, Rabbit MQ, Kafka, Azure Service Bus, AWS SQS, soon to be more!).
We’re certainly open to more suggestions from long term and potential users about what other features would make “Critter Stack Pro” a must have tool for your production environment. Trigger projection projection rebuilds on demand? Apply a new subscription? Pause a subscription? Force “Critter Stack Pro” to redistribute projections across the cluster? Smarter distribution algorithms based on predicted load? Adaptive distribution based on throughput?
And do know that we’re already working up a potential user interface for visualizing and monitoring Marten and Wolverine’s behavior at runtime.
This new product (knock on wood) is going to be delivered to a JasperFx customer within the next week or two for integration into their systems using Marten 7.0 and Wolverine 2.0 (also not coincidentally forthcoming at the end of the next week). I’m not going to commit to when this will be generally available, but I’d sure hope it’s sometime in the 2nd quarter this year.
The Shade Tree Developer 