Hi.
Since you asked ...
What comes to mind, when I hear the terms "Event Engine" and "Intelligent System" is that one of these terms is vastly more useful than the other.
As for the event driven approach, that has merrit, but is more a logical evolution of a job scheduling system, isn't it? As of today, jobs already start based on events - not only UC4's file events, but a scheduler triggering is nothing but an event, too. From a technical standpoint, UC4 has always been polling for events and reacted to those (mostly by starting jobs).
Of course, here's the thing: UC4 is actually very flexible already. As of this day, I can theoretically create and handle many events myself. Want to have a job start when an SMS comes in? Poll the industry modem's spool with a shell script, write out a file when the SMS comes, react to that file with a file event in UC4. Want to react to a Nagios event? Poll the URL with wget from a scheduler and start a job if the coffee maker reports a "critical" status for the coffee bean level.
So many of those things are already possible. What Automic appears to be doing these days under the moniker "Event
Engine" appears twofold: optimizing the event handling code
(optimization is a very welcome thing, if done properly), and adding
more interfaces for things then labeled "events". Automic can certainly add convinience (i.e. free customers from having to build these solutions themselves) and make it more obvious what can be done, and the process can be optimized by rooting event handling deeper in the Engine. These can be valuable things if done right (it's the if done right part that somewhat worries me). But let's also be clear, none of this is reinventing the wheel. And if I may say so, it appears it's at least partially in a search for use cases: Maybe because the really needed use cases have already been built as described by clients or consultants, or maybe because for some customers, the way they use AE is much more trivial than the forefront of Automic's strategists would sometimes like to envision.
Yes, it's kinda cool to see UC4 responsing to Alexa (once. if it works). And no, we're not doing it. We're instead struggling these days to get much more basic things to work reliably: Our experience with AE V12.1 has been so abysmal, with many basics that used to work in old versions not reliably working anymore. Basics such as simple file transfers (PRB00216843). Basics such as opening old versions of jobs (PRB00218930). And more.
And that's with having even skipped the "Zero Release", as is oftentimes suggested wisdom among more than a few Automic clients.
We want to upgrade our production systems to AE 12.1 in March. Not
half an hour ago, I had to answer to a representative of our users
currently testing the version 12.1, who appealed to me that it's impossible to go "productive" with the
current state of affairs (a realization that is forming with the admin staff
for quite some time as well).
But maybe it's us? Maybe we're using it wrong? Maybe we installed it wrong? Hm. Nope. It appears, without diving into sources, we are by far not alone with this overall assessment. So, before adding more "Event Driven" interfaces, before any more new developments that users and clients will latch on to, like Zero Downtime Upgrades or "Intelligent Automation": please consider vastly improving the stability, reliability, usability and, last not least, QA'ing of what you already have.
I'm not sure if, for example, this:
"Version 13, now rock solid, partly rewritten from scratch, over 500 bugs fixed"
would market better than this
"Version 13: Now 'Intelligent' ".
But it's certainly what this client would want.
Kind regards,
Carsten Schmitz
(edit, p.s. one aspect I missed that should be mentioned:
if the Event campaign leads to the polling engine to have a granularity of under a minute (as is the case for schedulers), that would be truly awesome. But this would take a major rework of the core which I'm at least sceptical about it happening near-term).