What are digital infrastructures?

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. ...

The units so far have explored quite a few, seemingly unrelated, concepts and observations. Here we’ll embed them in a unified framework that illustrates how they fit together. From the title of this book you can see that the main pillars of that framework include value, power, and risk. To get there, we need a fourth pillar: change. For now, we’ll call these pillars layers, though there is no implied hierarchy between them. ...