myCoreDump

Introduction

I hope you enjoy this core dump! The thoughts are so interrelated and connected it is difficult to optimize the presentation so you may need to apply your own defragmentation to get it. In addition, the order is not intended to indicate priority, it is all freaking important!

University API (UAPI)

When acquiring or developing an application it must have an API, and preferably a RESTful one. If the function of the application is core to university business then it should be exposed through the UAPI. If it is not a core function of most, if not all, educational institutions, we should expose the API through our API management tools, but it shouldn’t be part of the UAPI.

Personal API (PAPI)

When we build a system that will store personal / individual information we should consider how we might leave the information in the hands or possession of the individual and access it for our use through their personal API. Since no one yet has a personal API, for the time being we must provide that as well. This will require you to stretch your imagination and creativity, but that’s good for you.

Domain-Driven Design

Everyone should read at least the first two chapters of the book Implementing Domain-Driven Design by Vaughn Vernon! The super short summary – bring domain experts and developers together to create a ubiquitous language that is embedded in the code itself. In addition, define or determine bounded contexts wherein this language is valid. Without this you won’t understand how we’re going to build solutions and you won’t have a clue what is in and what is not in a microservice. Read it!

Microservices

Microservices are an architectural style that will be used at BYU to create larger systems. Systems built using microservices are loosely coupled, I would even go as far as saying they are highly decoupled, they implement a single business capability, they have well defined interfaces, and communicate using only these interfaces. The size of a microservice is governed by the size of the associated bounded context, go and read the DDD book! At BYU an important part of a microservices’ interface is its ability to raise events. Go figure out why.

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA)

Systems that poll are inefficient! Build systems that raise events so other systems don’t have to waste time and resources. You can keep asking me if you have to do this, but you can be assured that when I change my mind I’ll let you know. If you didn’t find the humor in the last sentence then go read the links again.

Application Acquisition

When we purchase applications we should give preference, strong preference, to those that run in the cloud. In fact, before we choose an application that is not available as a service choose someone in your group you don’t love and care about to come get my approval.

When we build services or applications they will run at Amazon and use the most abstract service offerings that make sense. In other words, we should not instantiate EC2 servers and S3 storage and then build queues, notification services, etc., but instead should use services such as SQS, SNS, Lambda Functions, etc.

DevOps

DevOps is a culture and practice that we hope will result in the rapid development, testing, and deployment of software. We are measuring the number of deployments / week, failures / week, and time to recovery. We are promoting small changes, thorough automated testing, and deployment to production often. Your team (the DDD team) is in charge and responsible for the functionality, performance, and reliability of “your” product.

If those in the hardware world think you’re off the hook, think again. Software is eating the world, software is eating your world. The days of interacting with network switches, routers, firewalls, etc. are over. Learn to program, learn to configure hardware devices using programs, learn to use DevOps to configure, test, and deploy hardware platforms as rapidly as “other” developers – that’s right, you just became developers!

Where to Compute

In the past we built data centers and populated them with servers, storage systems, and network components. As CPU performance increased computers became more able to run multiple applications, but stability due to unintentional application interaction made this approach intolerable.

We found ourselves with many underutilized servers running single applications to maintain reliability. Along came server virtualization enabling us to instantiate multiple virtual servers on each physical server. Over the past several years the number of physical servers has diminished considerably.

Well, it is time for another paradigm shift. We are now embarking on a journey that will result in our compute and storage being somewhere else. We will take advantage of Amazon to deliver what our applications and services need to run. Acquired applications will also run in the “cloud”. in either case they will not be housed here. Resources used previously to purchase servers and storage, and maintain them will be redirected to this new endeavor.

Networks

Unlike server and storage, I believe we will have a wired and wireless network on campus for the foreseeable future. However, the way we deploy, configure and maintain these networks will change drastically. Remember, software is eating the world and networking is not an exception to the rule. Network components will be physically installed in some generic way and then configured remotely via software.

In a DevOps fashion, when a problem occurs you figure out what went wrong in the configuration script, you repair the script, you test the script, and you redeploy. Remember, we’ll be watching how often you deploy, how many failures occur, and how long it takes to recover.

The days of hugging these devices are over. If you want one to hug, you can have one of the old ones and keep it in your office – disconnected from the network of course.

Domain of Ones Own (DoOO)

As we embark on this new path it is a great time for you to consider contributing to the content of the Internet. Let your light so shine by getting a domain of your own and sharing your goodness and skills with others. get one at domains.byu.edu. Here you can blog your greatest thoughts, post content that you syndicate to Facebook, Twitter or other services. Go learn, learning is fun!

We are offering this service to all students because we believe they should understand more about how the Internet works. We believe they have much to offer the world and they need to know they can share it with little help from service providers. What they build is transportable to other hosting services and is theirs! In the future a DoOO will enable an individual to have a portfolio and expose this and much more through their personal API (PAPI).

Final Thoughts – For Now!

We have a great team! Let’s pursue all of this FUN with the greatest enthusiasm and Heaven will shine down on us. Let us share our best thinking with others: share code on github, answer questions on stackoverflow, blog about your experiences, publish papers, present at conferences, participate on panels. In short, learn, teach one another, and teach the world!

Domains, Personal APIs, and Portfolios

Introduction

In addition to the traditional educational experience students at Brigham Young University receive, we want them to acquire skills, techniques, and tools that facilitate their current and future learning. We believe students should learn how to control and own their digital identity, content, and personal data. With this goal in mind we have initiated a pilot program using a concept known as Domain of Ones Own. We hope to accomplish several goals using this concept and associated training:

Teach students, faculty, and staff why they should care about owning, controlling, and appropriately sharing their online identity, the content that defines them, and their personal information.
Help individuals understand how to choose a domain name that accurately and professionally represents them to others.
Encourage members of our community to not simply consume, but contribute to the body of knowledge through the use of blogs and social media.
Support individuals in publishing a Personal API (i.e. api.example.com) that allows the owner to authorize others to interact with their personal information and revoke access privileges as desired.
Support students and faculty in creating a portfolio (i.e. api.example.com/portfolio) as part of their Personal API that is owned and maintained by the individual owner, and yet enables the owner to authorize others to consume, contribute to, and evaluate their collection.

Domain of Ones Own

Many members of our community share their pictures, memories, thoughts, insights, and writings on social media sites that are controlled by others. The privacy policies of these sites change over time, access privileges may change, copyright ownership is a concern, and the look and feel desired by the content owner may change without their knowledge, input, or control. Contributors have no control over the amount or type of advertising placed around or even over their content. In many cases they may not be able to easily move their content to other providers, remove content they no longer wish to share, or even pass ownership onto others as desired. We want members of the BYU community to understand that there is a better way.

Consequently, we have chosen to use and teach a concept known as Domain of Ones Own. We first herd about Domain of Ones Own from Jim Groom when he was at the University of Mary Washington. After a visit we were hooked on the idea of freeing our community and using the tool to rethink content ownership, Personal APIs, portfolios, and Learning Management Systems.

Our implementation of a Domain of Ones Own consists of a simple hosted server configured using cPanel and pointed to by the end-user’s chosen domain. We are using the service and tools provided by Reclaim Hosting who provides the tools, hosting, and the process for acquiring domains. With the default, initial configuration domain owners have a blog driven by the Known blogging tool. While this is a great introduction that allows domain owners to contribute immediately, the system is open and can grow as the domain owner’s sophistication increases. The system allows users to set up subdomains, email servers, database servers, and install and run many LAMP stack based applications. The tools and services have been chosen carefully to allow users to move their domain and associated content to other providers easily. Tools were chosen to be immediately useful, provide future flexibility, and help users learn introductory system administration skills that are critical to understanding the world they are in and will inherit.

Domains

We believe every individual should own and control their domain. Choosing an appropriate domain is important. In many cases the domain will be used in a professional capacity for years, perhaps for life. We are creating instructional material, including short video segments, which will give advice on how to choose well. We intend to create these materials in a way that minimizes branding and IP protection so others can easily use them for similar purposes at their institutions.

Personal API and Portfolios

Imagine a world where other sites on the web don’t hold your personal data, but instead request access to the data they need through your Personal API. Perhaps you grant them access to only the portions they actually need and restrict them from others. They use the resources they’ve been authorized to access, perform the business functions you desire, return results, and their access is revoked.

For example, imagine you work for weLovePrivacy.com and it’s payday. The payroll system springs to life and determines how much you should be paid this month. However, it needs to know how much should be withheld for taxes, how much pretax contributions to make, where these should be made, where you want your money deposited, etc. In a traditional system all of this information is centrally held. This centrally held information compels the institution to create systems to enable you to manipulate it, and makes the company liable for any loss of this data. On the other hand, you are depending on the institution safeguarding your personal information and not using it for nefarious purposes, a dangerous assumption.

However, there is a better way. Imagine the payroll system interacts with your Personal API to obtain your social security number, the number of exemptions you are declaring, the name of your 401k vendor, 401k account number, your checking account provider and account number, etc. The institutional system does the computation and disbursements, and your Personal API revokes access to these resources until the next time they are needed. While the institution could store the collected information it may not be in their best interest to do so and could even be released to them with the understanding it is to be used for the sole purpose disclosed to the user.

While it may be a while before ERP administrators are comfortable getting employee data from their personal API, there are plenty of other scenarios where a personal API is useful. Portfolios is an example of such a scenario. An instructor at an institution requests authorization to place assignments into your Personal Portfolio, their request is granted, and the assignments are deposited. You perform learning activities that generate solutions to the assignment, and deposit these in your portfolio. You have authorized the instructor to see them and place their critiques back into your portfolio. Since this is your portfolio it moves with you from one part of your life to another, from one institution to another, etc. It is yours to use and share as you choose.

Summary

It is time for learners to take control of their content, artifacts of education, and personal information. Our desire and intent is to teach these principles to our community and give them the necessary tools. We hope to do so in a way that others can easily use and benefit from.

Blog Moved to Domain of One’s Own

At Brigham Young University we are experimenting with and piloting a Domain of One’s Own experience for students, faculty, staff, courses, and who knows what other uses we’ll find. To experience this environment I have chosen to move some of my content to my new blog at kelly.flanagan.io with the associated site being hosted by Reclaim Hosting.

The main focus of this experiment is to educate, encourage, and facilitate students in taking control of their digital identity. Instead of placing their content on social media sites where others drive how their content is displayed, what security policies exist, and how long their content persists, we are hoping to give students a place they can call their own and control the way their content is shared with others of their choosing.

However, we also hope to use this environment to implement a personal API for each of our participants. Imagine that when a domain is created and hosted, a subdomain is also created, perhaps api.domain. This URL points to an application implementing an API for the individual. This personal API would have resources pertaining to the individual that would be created, retrieved, updated or deleted using appropriate HTTP methods. These resources would be protected by Oauth, or some other mechanism, allowing the individual the ability to protect their information from others while authorizing those they desire to access it.

In the end, perhaps this sort of architecture will result in institutions, like BYU, not having to hold onto individual personal information, but rather asking students, staff, faculty and others for permission to access the needed information from the individual’s personal API. This would allow individuals to control the use and spread of their information and reduces the amount of personal information the institution needs to protect; as a CIO, I really like that last bit!

There are others working in this area including Kin Lane, Jim Groom, Phil Windley, and others. If you want to participate, learn more, contribute or just listen in, please join us at the next University API and Domains (UAD) conference to be held again in early 2016.

Domain of One’s Own @ BYU

At Brigham Young University we’ve noticed the work at Mary Washington University on the Domain of One’s Own. I’ve been thinking for some time about providing each of our potential, matriculated and former students with a portfolio where they could deposit their application material before arriving, school work while here, and other contributions to society throughout their lives.

Students could then explicitly permit the institution to access and evaluate their work. They could permit potential employers to view samples of their work, and could interact with others through shared access, etc.

The MWU Domain of One’s Own initiative may be a great start at such a tool. I love their concept that in addition to a tool to facilitate student learning it also teaches students to take control of their own data and to stake out their own digital identity. In addition to learning traditional college disciplines, they learn to interact and communicate in the virtual online world.

We’re going to learn from these pioneers and bring the knowledge to the students at BYU. This should be an interesting and fun experience.