Skayl's technology is featured in Military Embedded System Magazine's new 2022 FACE Special Edition. This annual edition details the technology and solutions being developed under The Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Consortium. Skayl's co-founder, Gordon Hunt, discusses one of the fundamental problems with integration and examines the FACE Technical Standard and how it encourages an approach Skayl calls Infrastructure-Centric Integration. Skayl's technology is also featured.
Click here to read the 2022 FACE Special Edition.
May 2022 - The fundamental integration problem is managing the complexity of change and differences. We must solve it to effectively deliver warfighting capabilities faster and cheaper. We can try to minimize complexity but changes always will escape the scope of a single component and affect other parts of the system.
The FACE™ Technical Standard encourages an approach we call Infrastructure-Centric Integration, which accommodates change via the infrastructure instead of via the application. It does this by allocating mediation responsibility to the Transport Service (TS) in the form of capabilities such as data transforms, message association, and message routing. It also requires that portable application components use standardized TS APIs to send and receive data and to model communicated data in a structured format. The data model goes beyond mere syntax and includes semantics like units, measurements, and domain-specific context that are necessary for mediation.
Only the integrator has the necessary context to resolve the competing needs of the constituent parts in a system. The above requirements ensure they have the knowledge to determine the necessary data transforms and behavioral mediation. A capable infrastructure provides the mechanism.
In contrast, modifying applications in response to system needs forces them to know more about their surrounding environment and creates knowledge dependencies in the wrong direction, making each application less reusable. Additionally, that approach duplicates functionality. If each application implements its own mediation capabilities it increases the overall development cost and decreases the proportion of resources spent on core business logic.
The integration infrastructure (aka a FACE™ Transport Service) is a first-class system component that can be separately procured and managed. It both simplifies applications and enables integrators to use the full power of purpose-built, flexible infrastructure.
For more information: https://www.skayl.com/post/infrastrucutre-centric-integration.
