In 2005 I visited my father in France. It turned out to be convenient to pick me up from the Gerona airport in Spain. And as we had enough time, we had lunch in La Jonquera. At the restaurant’s checkout I noticed a peculiar array of devices: there were four payment terminals. I’d never seen that. From what I know, a merchant works with a bank which handles all their payments. Apparentely not over here. ...
Agile development is all the fashion nowadays. Why is that and what kind of digital infrastructures does that require? Back in the old days, business software was primarily written to automate existing business processes. Those processes might change somewhat as a result, but in the core processes were no different. Think accounting systems, scheduling, “customer relationship management” and so on. Today we see that software not only automates these business processes, but becomes part of the product, or even becomes the product itself. And on top of that, this software is often an on-line service. Think of the smart room thermostat. Or financial services, where software increasingly is the main part of the product: think online banking. And in social media from Facebook to Tindr, software really is the product. ...
What do roads, airports, the internet, the electricity network, and a search engine have in common? They are all services that are independent of a specific user or usage. They are provisioned on a longer timescale than that of an individual usage. And they are typically not owned by their users, or at least, not directly. In this book I am mostly concerned with digital infrastructures. Their services are digitally accessible. Of the above examples, the internet and the search engine are the best examples of that. Interestingly, the other services increasingly rely on digital infrastructures themselves, or even incorporate specific digital infrastructures. An example of that are the trading platforms that enable the planning of electricity supply and demand. In many countries, electricity is a market, not a monopoly, which requires coordination between the various players. ...
Deployment is everything that happens between writing software and actually using that software by its intended users. And as we get more software and more users, deployment becomes more complex. Why deployment diagrams? Deployment diagrams are a great technique for communicating about important decisions in deploying software. Decisions such as who is going to do what, how are things connected, and so on. There are many ways to draw deployment diagrams and many standards to choose from. UML and Archimate are just a few of them. To me, there is no single right way to create deployment diagrams. In that sense, these diagrams are more like maps. And the usefulness of a map depends on the journey that you are going to make. A map for a mountain walk is pretty useless if you want to make a railroad journey and vice versa. ...
The AI landscape has many digital infrastructures. Let’s explain this step by step and focus on which data is stored where, and how it is processed. A core element of AI systems is a trained model. At least that is true for the dominant AI form these days: deep learning neural networks. A trained model is the result of processing a lot of training data by a specific neural network. These models are fixed in size, but typically very big. The smallest useful models are close to a Gigabyte, while recent public chat models run into multiple Terabytes. ...