Discovery: Embracing the Cloud paradigm

What is Discovery?

Discovery is Caplin Platform’s service discovery application that allows you to take advantage of the possibilities of cloud deployments or alternatively simplify non-cloud deployments.

Discovery allows Caplin Platform components to auto-discover each other and automatically create a DataSource network.  Discovery provides a GUI so that you can view and monitor what components are a part of the network.

Discovery upgrades Caplin Platform’s licensing model and simplifies its networking configuration to enable Caplin Platform to take full advantage of the scaling potential of cloud platforms.

Caplin Platform applications register with Discovery, declaring the services they provide and the services they consume:

Discovery’s service registry is made available to all registered Caplin Platform applications. Applications that provide services automatically discover their consumers and connect to them:

Only the service discovery is done through Discovery; all the data travels directly from one component to another, just as it would in a traditional DataSource network.

Why did you build Discovery?

Increasingly people and organisations are moving deployments to the ‘cloud’, enabling them to take advantage of the dynamic resources it provides: CPU, memory, storage, network and firewalls.  They leverage a joint set of resources maintained elsewhere, and only using as much as they need for as long as they require. 

Deloitte identified a number of advantages for Banking in moving to the cloud.  We focused  on Deloitte’s Below the line optimisations, providing easy:

  • Scalability
  • License management
  • Configuration
  • Observability

This allows us to build resilient operations, enhance IT security and scale computing costs as needed.  

We built Discovery as we want the Caplin Platform to be able to take advantage of the benefits that deploying to the cloud can provide, while retaining all of the key features of the existing Caplin Platform deployments.  

We demonstrated early versions of Discovery to select customers and integrated their feedback.  It was quickly apparent that many of the features that we had prioritised for the cloud would also help make existing deployments and developing with the Platform easier.  

In addition, customers provided feedback and suggestions for features that we could incorporate into the product while we were working on Discovery.

Why you should use Discovery

The first production release of Discovery provides the following benefits:

  • A graphical view of your deployment that provides you with an insight into connectivity between components and performance
  • Peer discovery: providers of data services automatically discover and connect to consumers of their services. 
  • Allows dynamic scaling in response to current market conditions. 
  • Licensing service for all licensable Caplin Platform components

Highlight potential performance hot spots on your network by setting a latency threshold in Discovery’s web interface and selecting whether to display high-latency connections as a dashed line or flashing orange line.

What is next?

This has provided an overview of what Discovery is all about.  We are really excited about this new product and this release, and we can’t wait to tell you more about how Discovery will make our customers’ lives easier and the possibilities that it will unlock. 

Future posts will dive deeper into:

  • Discovery GUI
  • Datasource Network Configuration
  • Licensing
  • Scaling

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