Subject: [sacm] [draft-ietf-sacm-terminology] Composition Concept & Building Blocks (#7)

From: henkbirkholz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2015 08:26:48 -0700

It might be beneficial to readers of the drafts (especially regarding the architecture) to illustrate what the definition of a SACM Component is and how it is composed (that term is not covered in the current terminology draft). There is already a definition for Building Blocks, but it is only loosely tied to the concepts described in, e.g. the architecture.

In a nutshell, a potential composition concept for SACM could be based on something like this:
“Every SACM Capability (which are Building Blocks composed into SACM Components) can provide (aka produce) an output (called a Result in SACM) that can be consumed by another SACM Capability (that is part of another SACM Component).”
In this example, the SACM Capabilities are the Building Blocks (please also see Issue “Capability and Function”)

Overall, the terminology would strongly benefit from defining what the Building Blocks that compose SACM Components precisely are. The Building Blocks would include the specific interfaces via which production and provision of information takes place on the Data Plane (correspondingly, there would be Building Blocks with Interfaces to the Management Plane, which control Data Plane Building Blocks that are, e.g., part of the same SACM Component).

Introduction of this concept would probably have an impact on the structure of the architecture draft, but could as a result significantly increase the  comprehensibility for readers new to SACM.
There would be two quite valuable views on the SACM architecture: A component focused one (“top-down”), and a provider/consumer focused one (“bottom-up”).

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/sacmwg/draft-ietf-sacm-terminology/issues/7