| Description |
In the hyper-connected world, all things (nodes) need to communicate at the application level. An application (or a system) requires to compile/process data and/or knowledge from multiple sources (other applications and/or nodes). This means that with today’s central cloud architecture, all nodes and applications must continuously send their data to their own backend hosted in central cloud to be processed and then the decision needs to be sent back to the application for action. There are a few challenges with this model: communications latency, cost of cloud hosting, data privacy, potential security breaches and fraud on data which are more important for some industries than others. For instance, for the oil and gas industry, there are two major challenges with today’s cloud model: 1) the majority of oil rigs are in areas with very limited connectivity hence data transmission is expensive, unreliable and slow and 2) due to environmental compliance policies, the data often has to remain on the source (oil rig) to prevent potential data manipulation and misrepresentation (data fraud).
The other major problem is compatibility between different applications and stakeholder’s solutions such as SCADA systems and smart pumps with field technicians’ devices visiting the oil rig. With today’s central cloud, the most elegant solutions are developed with standard microservice driven solution architectures where each microservice exposes its own resource and functionality through a set of Restful API(s). These microservices are exchanging data via Restful API(s) either amongst themselves across one or multiple applications that are either triggered via a client application request or system request.
In this project we would like to explore efficient ways of enabling future compatibilities of systems through a microservice driven architecture where smart equipment and applications have limited connectivity with the objective of improving system-level performance and productivity while complying with data protection policies.
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