Terracotta

I write software for Terracotta, which is an open-source company. I love working on open source code, in part because what I do is not a secret - I can tell my geeky friends about the cool problems that I wrestle with. (I also work on Eclipse, another open source project.)

Paradoxically, though, it seems like in the open source world it is often very hard to talk about who my customers are. Partly that's because we don't always know - anyone can download the product for free. But also it's because our paying customers don't always want their competition to know how they succeed, and we of course need to honor their confidentiality.

So I'm really pleased that Terracotta has lately been getting some great press about one of our important customers, Sabre Holdings. They're perhaps most commonly known for one facet of their business, Travelocity. Sabre is huge - according to one article, "On any given day, Sabre's servers have to be able to handle up to half a billion transactions a day and a peak volume that can go up to 32,000 transactions per second."

How do they get that kind of volume, and the reliability that has to go with it? Answer: they run their mission-critical, high-volume stuff on Terracotta, my software. Yes, I'm proud :-)