Changing the Focus from Application-Centric to Infrastructure-Centric Integration: Addressing the Challenges of System-of-System Integration and Leveraging the FACE Technical Standard
Shaun Foley, principal software engineer at Skayl, discusses changing the focus of integration from application-centric to infrastructure centric. Traditionally, middleware infrastructure has been required to help solve the challenge of integrating heterogeneous technologies by providing location transparency, independence from underlying platform architectures, scalability, quality of service features and other features.
However, the application’s use of the selected infrastructure leads to an application-centric integration paradigm. Applications control and specify where, how, and what gets distributed and exchanged resulting application awareness of system context and behavioral interactions. This is difficult to manage for a distributed application (a system), but near impossible for a system-of-systems.
The FACE Technical Architecture, in its Transport Services architectural segment provides an abstraction from infrastructure capabilities features allowing for a broader range of solutions to be applied at integration time. Properly implemented and applied, the TS enables an infrastructure-centric integration paradigm. One where as-built systems can be meaningfully integrated which each other without application modification and integration is accomplished through modification and configuration of the infrastructure. This perspective, and its automatability through the use of semantic data models, is what makes this approach to integration scalable.
This presentation will discuss the Transport Services architectural layer in the FACE technical standard and demonstrate a range of benefits that can be derived through automation with an infrastructure-centric approach. The use of appropriate models of data, communication, computing platforms, and deployment to enable high degrees of automation in assembling and generating a fully configurable infrastructure for a highly integrated system will also be demonstrated.