Mission Assurance

Mission Assurance Corporation is focused on eliminating failure in networks, their components and the applications that depend on them. Networks and software routinely fail for a complex set of reasons. Most of these reasons are structural, endemic and virtually unavoidable. By using mobile Microservices, Mission Assurance’s products will provide the adaptability necessary to minimize the impact of such failures.

Adaptability in IT is defined as the ability to dynamically switch resources in response to changing conditions. Mission Assurance believes that writing applications as distributed Microservices is the only way to provide the necessary adaptability and self-healing properties needed to eradicate large-scale failure. Applications written in this manner not only utilize pre-programmed policy to relocate away from failing servers; they also give system administrators the fine-grained control necessary to react and respond to equipment failure quickly enough to ensure 100% availability.

In traditional architectures, applications & servers are static and composed of tightly coupled components. Therefore, if a server or the network it resides upon fails, applications using those components cannot be relocated and are therefore rendered useless. More importantly, in a distributed system, if another software program that an application needs to do its job has problems, the application can also be rendered ineffective. Finally, if a piece of an application fails, the whole application grinds to a halt.

In Mission Assurance’s architecture, the Assurance Ecosystem (Æ), applications are broken into tiny components that work collectively to solve problems. If any individual component of an application fails for any reason, the system itself senses the failure and simply re-launches a healthy replacement. This approach allows for the solution of problems previously ignored because of their cost-prohibitive nature and technological complexity. MA’s architecture also lends itself to a level of code reuse that is unprecedented and therefore represents extreme financial advantages.

Technology Innovation

Mission Assurance's architecture combines aspects of several longstanding fields of research in computer science to reach a surprising set of results - a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Briefly, these include:

• Grid Computing
• Component Framework Architectures
• Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)
• Space-Based Computing (Jini & JavaSpaces)
• Mobile Agent Technology
• Groupware / Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
• Distributed databases
• Policy, Rules & Process Management
• AAA, Security and VPNs

Each of these fields has proceeded for years with varying degrees of success, but the potential of these technologies has never fully been unlocked. The Assurance Ecosystem (Æ) was influenced by each of these computing technologies; relevant principles were used when they supported the goals of delivering Mission Assurance in a global system.

Æ is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Services are programs with a dedicated function that have a simple and standard way of communicating with other services. Microservice is the MA term for the elemental pieces of Æ, bite-size programs written with Rapid Application Development (RAD), that work in concert to perform more complex tasks. At a high level, the Mission Assurance Service Oriented Architecture provides a solution to the following problems that arise when deploying a large number of Microservices:

• How will Microservices automatically deploy?
• How will Microservices recognize and find each other?
• How will they communicate in an effective and scalable manner?
• How will they allocate work and prioritize tasks?
• How will they sense failure and regenerate themselves?

Architecture

Assurance Ecosystem is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) providing specific framework and business components and delivered as a runtime middleware product composed of agent-like mobile micro services distributed over a general-purpose computing GRID.

MA Corp provides an extensive collection of in-common, interlocking services called the Assurance Ecosystem. This includes major subsystems capable of performing the principle functions of distributed applications.

• Framework Services
• Distributed Data Services
• Work management Services
• Policy Services
• Distributed Intelligent Agent Services
• Security Services
• Self-management and Accounting

By inheriting common characteristics, all Microservices (remote deployment, manageability, introspection, accounting, authentication, reconnection, and community interaction) launch with all the network intelligence needed to function as part of a community.

Management Agents control the deployment and life cycle of Microservices, insuring that the proper resource mix of any likely job is at hand. Applications written using Microservices are able to behave contextually, responding to events by testing them against conditional polices and taking appropriate action. When necessary, these agent services are capable of assembling to solve a problem and then disappearing, freeing up compute resources.