What’s New in RTI Routing Service?

In Episode 37 of The Connext Podcast:

• [0:32] What is RTI Routing Service?
• [1:20] What can our customers do with Routing Service that they couldn’t do before Connext 6?
• [4:11] What applications are we seeing this used in?
• [5:19] How both Recording Service and Routing Service compliment each other?

Related Content:

• [Case + Code] Monitor Remote Devices in the Internet of Things
• [Datasheet] Connext 6
• [Documentation] Migrating to Connext 6
• [Download] Free 30-Day Trial of Connext DDS
• [Podcast] Connext 6 - Now Available
• [Video] RTI, DDS and the Industrial Internet of Things
• [Webpage] Connext 6
• [Webpage] Routing Service 
• [Webpage] Recording Service

Podcast Transcription:

Steven Onzo : Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Connext Podcast. My guest today is a senior software engineer who worked on features like Routing Service, which is what we'll be talking about today. Please welcome to the Connext Podcast, Antonio Sanchez.

[0:32] What is RTI Routing Service

Antonio, thanks for being here with us today talking about Routing Service. I guess we'll just jump right into the interview, and I'd like to kick things off and ask you what Routing Service is.

Antonio Sanchez: Hello, Steven. Thank you for having me here. Alright. So what is Routing Service? So it's our solution for interconnecting systems to achieve scalability on integration. It's pretty much just an application that is going to allow you to breach data from different data domains. Then it can connect different data technologies other than DDS. Also, something that makes it special is that it allows for custom processing of the data that goes through Routing Service.

[1:20] What can our customers do with Routing Service that they couldn’t do before Connext 6?

Steven Onzo : What can our customers do with Routing Service that they couldn't do before the release of Connext 6?

Antonio Sanchez: So there are actually a few new things that Routing Service can do now. One of them is related to the flexibility of how the user configures the data forwarding. So Routing Service has actually a few great improvements. One of them is related to the flexibility where the user can specify the configuration on how the data flows from one side to the other because it allows for better usage of the resources. Before it was a little bit rigid, and you would end up having a situation where you were using a lot of resources or bandwidth. So we have removed that limitation, so now there’s more performance, more efficiency.

With that flexibility, in order to make that even more powerful, what we have done is introduce a new customization capability that we call the processor, and this processor is a pliable component that is going to allow the users to have full control of the data flow that goes in routing service. This is very, very powerful because it's what is going to allow users to define their own sort of extended version of routing service. It's going to be very specific for their use case.

This processor, just to go a little bit deeper, you can think of it as ... It's an API and is the gateway where you're going to have inputs and outputs, and the users are going to be able to read the data that goes in, process it, and send it to the output. And then this is an addition to the existing adapter or transformation as the case. That has other purposes, but that's what makes it very, very flexible and accessible.

And then the last one I would say that is very, very important and powerful is a new architecture of the administration monitoring infrastructure with a focus on making them more scalable, usable, and especially consistent. So the idea is that now we have defined a model that is common for not only Routing Service but all the infrastructure services. So that's going to help the users to just learn only one model and use it across all our products. And right now, Routing Service and Recording Service are the products used in the new infrastructures.

[4:11] What applications are we seeing this used in?

Steven Onzo: Excellent. And can you give us an example of how developers will utilize routing service and in what applications we'll see it used?

Antonio Sanchez: Right, so I think in many cases, what they will do is they will configure Routing Service, and they will just run the application as an executable. Most of the cases is when they have systems that they leave in an external network, like a WAN, and then they need to connect those obligations to others that live in a local network. So that will be just confusing Routing Service with the proper QoS settings to perform that bridging. The other case is more when the users have besides DDS, they have another data domain that they need to connect that is not DDS. And in that case, they will use the adapter is the gate to develop a plug-in that will allow it to communicate with that data domain that it's not DDS. And then we'll use Routing Service with a proper configuration to communicate both DDS and non DDS systems.

[5:19] How both Recording Service and Routing Service compliment each other?

Steven Onzo : In this episode, we're also talking about Recording Service. Can you talk a little bit about how both recording service and Routing Service compliment each other?

Antonio Sanchez: So I think Routing Service is a very generic and powerful application. So I would say that actually Routing Service compliments not only Recording Service but all the infrastructure services. But just to give you an example, most of the times, Recording Services will be placed on the edge where the data is being stored. But then, again coming back to the previous example, if the data is generated in an external network like a WAN, then Recording Service cannot be placed there directly. So you will need the Routing Service so that you can get that data from the external network to the edge where the data is recorded by Recording Service. So that would be probably the most common case of complimenting each other.

Steven Onzo: Well Antonio, I want to thank you for coming onto the podcast and giving us some insight on
Routing Service and a little bit of Recording Service. Thank you. See you next time.

Antonio Sanchez: Thank you. See you.