Post a Comment On: Network of Things

Building a building block in the next generation adaptive enterprise is not easy to say the least. The most difficult part is not the complex mechanisms that constitute an adaptive system but the complex communication patterns that emerge that need to be controlled.

So I thought it would be a good idea to put together a list of salient features of any adaptive systems. Here they are..

1) Hierarchies: In any complex system, there is bound to be an hierarchy or multiple hierarchies. To make things even more difficult to implement, these hierarchies are based on loosely coupled entities which join/leave the network as and when they please. The biggest issue of this characteristic is in finding the best addressing scheme.

2) Aggregation: Aggregation or grouping is another characteristic. These groups are short lived or long lived and can form dynamically. Their boundaries need to be represented syntactically in the system and access in and out of this boundary needs to be controlled.

3) Communication: The foundation of any adaptive system lies in it's communication substrate. Communication in such systems is generally a conversation rather than a fire & forget type asynchronous communication or block & timeout type sychronous one.

4) Control: Control is the method to the madness. Unlike conventional systems, however, the control is not static and hardwired but dynamic and mostly embedded in the interaction.

5) Non-Linear Behavior: Unlike your SNMP type faults, faults in such a system cascade into really big blackouts. Fault control mechanisms are there not your traditional "call home or email admin" mechanism but more like circuit breakers. The ability to counter a cascading fault is the true gauge to robustness. It is not about 5 nines and MTBFs.

6) Finally, separation of form from function. I believe I blogged on this when I first started on this project.

Ok, now to implement such a system what has computer science given us? Well, so far just two concepts (a) abstraction (b) virtualization.