GitLab

This issue is here to keep track of current design discussions happening relative to the overall architecture of the many NRM components.

@vreis is working hard on identifying the exact frontier between NRM, the container runtimes, the message passing layer, the control flow layer, the various clients, and the different OS/Node interfaces. The ultimate goal is to be able to streamline most of the core NRM logic, as it is inherently "just a control loop".

Overall Design

The idea is to delineate the frontier between the different NRM components to:

• provide precise definitions for datatypes these components use
• define the right abstractions (methods and state) for how these components appear to each other
• create an infrastructure (as in declarative programming) to automatically generate most of the APIs between components
• create the means to replace some of these components with better, more adapted, more stable implementations.

So far we've identified the following components:

• core NRM event loop (networking and control flow)
• OS/Node Interactions
• Control Loop (externalized with future-proofing)

And the following datatypes:

• NRM events: messages, decisions, control flow events, timers
• NRM state: configuration, active components
• Command: every bit of information required to launch a process from the control flow core
• Behavior: action to take after event

And the following abstractions:

• Container
• Actuator
• Sensor
• Controller
• Application

Datatypes

Abstractions