Hi all, it was fun seeing some of you for the first time at ApacheCon 2016. Following Anatole’s suggestion let’s start a discussion of iota. To get things started I just wanted to direct your attention to the iota web page http://iota.incubator.apache.org/ <http://iota.incubator.apache.org/> from the block diagram we can see that we want iota to run at the device level, at a standalone level and at the cluster level. A device might be a RaspberryPi, a standalone might be someone’s laptop or a commodity server and a cluster a Mesos cluster of many commodity servers.
Let’s begin the discussion by considering two major components 1) the Dataflow runtime and 2) the Microservices and API framework. Security is critical but let’s leave that for a future discussion. What is the problem we are trying to solve with iota? Certainly one goal is the orchestration of data coming from small and large networks of sensors often using many different protocols. What does this imply? We will need to interact with sensors and actuators that are IP based and older protocols that are based on legacy protocols such as Bacnet and Modbus. We want to enable s secure (later discussion) orchestration of a wide variety of devices across a broad spectrum of protocols. iota is IP based as are many modern protocols other protocols are not IP based and will require translators (in some instances) to bring them into an IP world. To summarize, we need to be able to ingest and output to devices from legacy systems to modern IP based systems. Once we have ingested data where is it stored and for how long? How can it be used to orchestrate a network of devices that can interact with humans? In other words how do we do orchestration? Finally how to we enable others to contribute microservices that can be used to build a vibrant orchestration system? We have a solution that we have developed based on Akka Actors that I can describe called the ‘Fey’ engine. It is named after the person who invented the first slot machine (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fey <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fey>). Before I proceed with a description of the ‘Fey’ engine I just wanted to open up a discussion on iota in general and to let those on the dev mail list introduce themselves. Looking forward to hear from you. Next the Fey Engine -Tony
