Houston-based INT, purveyor of software ‘widgets’ that are widely used by major upstream software vendors and by in-house oil and gas company developers has announced Ivaap* a new microservices-based back end for its geoscience and engineering data visualization and analysis solutions.
The Ivaap framework is designed to connect to multiple data streams such as a Witsml server. Developers can aggregate, analyze and display well and other data from multiple sources including Int’s own GeoServer. Ivaap is cloud-enabled and ‘network-secure’ for remote collaboration. Microservices technology, which favors lightweight, componentized software over monolithic applications is cloud-friendly and scalable for concurrent processing, performance and high-availability. INT’s compact widgets are well-suited to the microservices-style architecture.
INT CEO Olivier Lhemann told Oil IT Journal, ‘Ivaap is organized as a suite of services that are easy to discover and use. Ivaap leverages Hateos which enforces the inclusion of hyperlinks within its web responses. The structure of a Witsml data source, a LAS file or a SQL database can easily be explored by following the links returned by a request. This means that rather than enabling interoperability through the definition of new standards, microservices offer tools that other developers or partners can use to solve their problem.’
‘We use the Akka Framework to package our microservices so that they are highly concurrent, secure and resilient. Our customers can use other technologies to augment the functionality of the platform and integrate with their own services.’ Another early-adopter of microservices is GE whose Predix leverages a suite of ‘discoverable’ microservices.
While cloud-deployed microservices are clearly of interest to IT, the big question for the business is whether they can will really enhance interoperability between software components from different vendors. We asked Lhemann if Ivaap would ease interoperability with, say, GE’s Predix. He replied, ‘We have limited experience with Predix but as it is based on Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry, Predix applications deployed to the cloud will access external resources via the Open Service Broker API, launched last December. Eventually, Open Service Broker could be a good bridge between Ivaap and Predix. We are not quite there yet, but this seems like a good way to proceed in the future.’ More from INT.
* INT Visualization and Analytics Platform.
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