Last week, Workframe partnered with Clojure/nyc to host a discussion on Datomic Ions with the creator of Clojure, Rich Hickey. If you weren’t among the Clojurists in attendance, we’ve summed up the key takeaways below. If you are interested in learning more about Clojure/nyc and our future events, follow us on Twitter or Facebook and join our Meetup group!

Rich Hickey presents Datomic Ions to an enthusiastic Clojure/nyc audience

The idea behind Datomic Ions is to introduce simplicity and power to Clojure cloud-based applications. Ions let you focus on writing your Clojure code; the Ions tooling will get your app running on your Datomic cloud nodes, without you having to manage instances, deploy infrastructure or take on the typical DevOps/security overhead we all face. And, you don’t need to become an AWS expert to deploy at scale.

Rich opened the talk by asking the room how familiar they are with Clojure, Datomic and the Datomic Cloud, as each item presents a problem that needs to be solved. He continued on to explain the ideas behind Ions, the Datomic cloud architecture and the Ions tooling and application lifecycle model. Put simply, Datomic Cloud and Ions represent a new take on scaling transparently without sacrificing the benefits of data locality; instead of running the Datomic query engine in your application (the “peer” model) you run you application on your Datomic cluster.

He said, “the goal with Clojure, Datomic, Datomic Cloud and Ions is maximize your power and leverage your focus. It’s the ability to get work done.”

Datomic Ions the latest chapter in Rich’s mission to bring simplicity and ease to software engineering. If you haven’t seen his classic talk “Simple Made Easy,” check it out! As Rich described in his Ions talk abstract: “The incidental complexity dragon never sleeps! In building Datomic Cloud we took on simplifying Datomic deployment, security and scaling on AWS, embodying and encapsulating best practices and maximizing connectivity to the AWS ecosystem.”

The Workframe team makes heavy use of Datomic and we’re in the process of thinking through the potential impact of Ions for our infrastructure. When we emerge from the hammock, we’ll have a lot more to say about it.

Are you interested in learning more about Clojure and Datomic Ions? Check out the whole talk on Youtube now!