I have a dream

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
Oscar Wilde.

As discussed yesterday, I have a dream when it comes to system interfaces. Interfaces will be able to be constructed by mere mortals, not only by that rare breed of gun system-level programmers. My dream goes something like this:

  • The control and management plane of future devices will be virtualised on a compute platform
  • The device’s control/management plane will store management information in database (eg a MIB – Management Information Base)
  • The OSS that the device interfaces with will also store information in a database format
  • The “interface” will be built around a model such as ODBC that shares data between each database
  • Each side of the interface (eg the device and the OSS) will present the full schema (structure / objects / tables) of its MIB when requested
  • There will be a graphical interface that presents the schema on device and OSS and allows the aforementioned mere mortal to simply map objects in the device to objects in the OSS (or vice versa)
  • The graphical interface will allow for simple mappings or complex data parsing mappings
  • Mapping rules could be sequential (eg OSS requests data from device, does operations on the data then pushes it back to the device, programmatic loops like IF/THEN statements)
  • The graphical interface will provide a testing sandpit that allows the user to check how their mapping rules are mapping real data between the device and the OSS without actually sending to production environments
  • The graphical interface will also allow the user to establish rules around the nature of data transfers (ie read-only, data gets, data puts, triggers, automated sends on certain events, constant polling, scheduled polls, etc)

So, given that I am only a mere mortal, is there anyone out there capable of turning this dream into reality in partnership with me? I even have a picture of the GUI for this dream to pass on to anyone who is willing to assist…. Anyone? Anyone??

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