1. Chief Strategy Officer / Inductive Automation
Moderator: Don Pearson
Chief Strategy Officer / Inductive Automation
Hello and welcome back for day three of the 2016 Ignition Community Conference!
Yesterday was great, I heard from so many of you and it’s really amazing to see the work you’re doing!
This morning we wanted to really get the ball rolling by hearing about what’s next for Ignition so you can all get a clearer picture of what to expect from it in the coming years.
There are no two better people to address that topic than who we will hear from today, Inductive Automation’s Co-Director’s of Software Engineering – Carl Gould & Colby Clegg

2. Carl Gould
Colby Clegg
Co-Director of Software Engineering / Inductive Automation
Co-Director of Software Engineering / Inductive Automation
Before I bring them out I’d like to just talk to you for a minute about our session format today.
This session has traditionally been our highest attended, that’s why this year we decided to make this a general session.
We are going to get started with a presentation from Carl and Colby about what’s coming next in the development for Ignition. Immediately after their presentation they will take a seat up here on our panel and I’ll come back out an conduct an extended Q&A session.
We want to hear from you so if you have questions during their presentation please hold those for the Q&A afterwards.
With that let’s get started. Please join me in welcoming to the stage our speakers for today’s session, Carl Gould and Colby Clegg.

3. Overview Module Showcase
Distributed Architectures - Today and Tomorrow
Development Timeline - Ignition 8.0
Q & A
Colby
Today we’re going to talk about the future of ignition before we get into questions.
First we have some updates about the module SDK, then we wanted to discuss some new architectural ideas and how we see them evolving in the future, and lastly we’ll present a timeline and some plans for the future of Ignition.

4. Ignition’s Open SDK (Carl)
We talk about Ignition as a “Platform” - what does that mean?
Open, public API - anyone can write a module for Ignition.
Few years ago we introduced module marketplace so 3rd party developers could develop modules and sell them
2 way to make modules
Private,
Public – public came with caveats: percentage, sold through marketplace
In reality - the API itself has been very successful
most development is private: in-house applications, niche development.

5. Module Showcase
Colby
Today we are transitioning to the module showcase.
This removes us as the middle-man for selling private modules.
This means all requirements for module authors are removed, and authors get 100% of their sale revenue.
We’re excited to see the community of 3rd party developers flourish.

6. Overview Module Showcase
Distributed Architectures - Today and Tomorrow
Development Timeline - Ignition 8.0
Q & A
Next, let’s talk about the distributed architectures — today and tomorrow

7. Gateway Network Architectures
Hub-and-spoke
Scale-out
Carl
The set of new “distributed services” we’ve built upon the platform’s Gateway Network feature represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible with Ignition in the enterprise. Ignition gateway’s forming their own network across various levels of an enterprise network creates a new breed of architectures that was not possible before.
These architectures tend to fall under two categories:
Hub-and-spoke, where you have remote sites that need to coordinate with a central site
Scale-out, where you need multiple gateways to work together in order to support the load of the system
In 7.9, we’ve addressed these to a certain degree, but we’re nowhere near the end of the road. We’ll take a look at how some of these concepts will develop.

8. Hub and Spoke – Central Database
Colby
Hub and spoke is the term we use any time you have multiple sites which need to coordinate with a central location.
Our original architecture of being database centric made this possible simply by connecting the spokes directly to the central DB
Problems:
1. Security
2. Performance

9. Hub and Spoke – Gateway Network
Carl
With the gateway network, today, these two problems have been resolved.
By forwarding history collection over the GN, performance on high-latency connections is dramatically better. We ran some performance diagnostic tests on networks with high latency and saw improvements of up to 80x, something that took 15 min direct to db now took 8sec.
This is where hub and spoke is today

10. Hub and Spoke – Fully Operable Sites
Colby
Each individual site is fully independent, operating with history, alarms, clients, etc.
However, they all tie into a central HQ gateway that can tie them all together, and perform central monitoring and data warehousing. If connection is lost, site continues to operate.
The idea that each site automatically can retain some history locally, say a month’s worth, and coordinate with the central site for long-term history storage.
This is all possible today, but here’s where we see some room for improvement in the future.
Since this concept is so popular, we want to make it more of a built-in feature and easier to configure.
There is also room for improvement in the realm of coordinating authentication and making sure everything works whether the connection to the central site is available or not.

11. Scale-Out
Now, let’s look at the other category of distributed architecture that we mentioned, Scale Out. There are many ways a single gateway can get overloaded...

12. Scale-Out
Connecting to many devices...

13. Scale-Out
Having a huge number of tags

14. Scale-Out
And serving hundreds of clients

15. Scale-Out
Colby
The gateway network lets us start partitioning our system up, allowing each gateway to service a reasonable amount of I/O and tags.

16. Scale-Out
We can then create front-end servers which use remote tag providers to create a lightweight view of all the tags, effectively recombining them into a single tag space.

17. Scale-Out
We can then use commodity load balancing solutions in order to serve as many clients as we need to.
Ignition 7.9 has made great strides towards enabling this. The architecture you see here is, in fact, possible today. The difficulty comes in effectively managing the load across the various gateways. If some devices or tags need to be moved, or split off onto a new server, the process requires a fair amount of manual intervention. Similarly, when adding new servers, gateway connections need to be managed manually. As we go forward, we would like to eliminate these points of difficulty, so that resources can be added and adjusted with minimal difficulty.

18. Overview Module Showcase
Distributed Architectures - Today and Tomorrow
Development Timeline - Ignition 8.0
Q & A
Next, we’d like to talk about the Ignition development timeline and Ignition 8.0.

19. Development Timeline Carl
As you may know, 10 years ago we drafted a perfect development timeline that has brought us here today to the release of Ignition 7.9…
Of course this is not true, this just isn’t how software companies work. Any software company that committed to a 10, or even 5 year timeline would likely find themselves with the wrong product 5 or 10 years later.
And yet, we do get asked quite regularly to produce such a timeline.
Let’s talk about how we really work.

20. Development Timeline Colby
This is how the development timeline really looks.
We know what we’re doing for the next major release, but beyond that, we have a loose collection of ideas.
So, with that in mind, let’s look at what we know we’re doing next, and ideas we have for the future.

21. Development Timeline Mobile UI 100% web based
Mobile-first responsive layouts
Familiar Drag & Drop + binding design
Modern graphics & UX
High-performance
Offline capable
Seamless horizontal scalability
Clients
Tags
Continued development of distributed services
Improved tag performance
Improved support for modern database
Thanks, now we’ll hand it back over to Don for our Q&A

22. Developer Panel: Questions?
Carl Gould
Colby Clegg
Co-Director of Software Engineering
Co-Director of Software Engineering
(Don)
Thanks Carl and Colby.
So now it’s time to start the panel portion of our session today which I will be moderating. I’ve got a few questions for these guys but this is really your opportunity to get your questions answered.
We have two mic runners on each side of the stage. Please raise your hand and they will run a mic to you so you can ask Carl and Colby your question.
Q: In working on the development of Ignition version 7.9; what were some of your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
Q: Which technology trends are you watching the closest in terms of future opportunities for Ignition?
Q: When developing new features for Ignition; where do the ideas come from; what inspires those ideas?
Q: Both of you have been around since the early days of Ignition – before it was even called Ignition – comment if you will, on what you think about the growth of the community that has grown up around Ignition and how that has affected your work.

23. So with that, we’re done with our session
So with that, we’re done with our session. Thanks so much for your questions, your work and your passion for Ignition. Let’s have a great day of sessions!
And please, let’s give a hand for our speakers today, thanks guys.