📕 Flow Architectures

Chapter 1

The book opens in the year 2034 and it assumes a set of fictional flow standards have been widely adopted by companies over the past 10 years. World Wide Flow has unlocked innovation in finance, retail, transportation and health care. There are streams of data available for anything and everything because sharing real-time data has become so cheap. Event streams are considered critical to national infrastructure.

The hypothetical article demonstrates flow in action and the possible outcomes, good and bad, that are unlocked in local and global economies. WeatherFlow, AnyRent, Real Time Economy and Load Leader are four fictional projects referred to throughout the book. Each of the projects represent a flow pattern: Distributor, Collector, Signal Processor and Facilitator.

What is flow? Flow is networked software integration that is event-driven, loosely coupled, and highly adaptable and extensible. It is principally defined by standard interfaces and protocols that enable integration with a minimum of conflict and toil.

Flow represents a model of information exchange between software applications and services where consumers request data streams through self-service interfaces, and producers maintain control over accepting requests and pushing relevant information automatically once connections are established, all transmitted via standard network protocols.

Flow does happen today. Recently I used the web hook pattern (where the producer calls the consumer). It's expensive to set up though. I was working consumer side. The fact that I had to architect tells us already that this is an expensive. I had human interaction with the provider (Slack and video calls) to negotiate the connection with the producer (went back and forth on shape of data and security protocols). Lots of friction.