Business Units

A business unit refers to a segment of a company that operates within its own individual guidelines but is still tied to the larger organizational framework. It is a discrete operational entity within a corporation, with its own mission, resources, and objectives, and is often aligned around a specific product line, market segment, or geography. Business units are typically responsible for their own strategic planning, product development, marketing, and profit and loss management.

In the context of distributed systems like Intino, each business unit plays a crucial role in the overall architecture of the system. These units are akin to micro-organizations within the larger ecosystem, each equipped to handle specific domain-specific functions. Here’s how business units function within such environments:

• Autonomy: Each business unit operates autonomously, making decisions that best serve its specific market and product strategies. This autonomy is crucial for fostering innovation and responsiveness to market changes.
• Integration: Despite their autonomy, business units must integrate seamlessly with other parts of the organization. In distributed systems, this integration is often facilitated through shared services like data hubs, IT infrastructure, and security protocols.
• Scalability: Business units allow an organization to scale efficiently. By compartmentalizing functions and responsibilities, companies can add new units or expand existing ones without disrupting the core operations of other units.
• Specialization: Business units enable a focused approach to product development and customer service, as each unit specializes in a specific aspect of the company’s offerings. This leads to enhanced expertise and better service delivery.

In Intino, business units are designed as modular components of the distributed system, each potentially utilizing hexagonal architecture to ensure flexibility and maintainability of their software solutions. They interact with centralized components like the Datahub through well-defined interfaces, adhering to a publisher-subscriber model. This model ensures that updates and data are efficiently propagated throughout the organization, maintaining system coherence and data integrity.

Application Architecture

In Intino, business units are developed using the hexagonal architecture, a design pattern that emphasizes the separation of a system's core logic from external elements it interacts with, such as databases, user interfaces, or external services. This architecture, also known as the ports and adapters pattern, allows changes to these external elements without affecting the core logic.

The hexagonal architecture organizes the application into a central core, surrounded by a layer of ports and adapters. The core contains the business logic, while the ports define points of interaction with external elements through interfaces. Adapters implement these interfaces to translate between the external technologies and the business logic. Intino uses two specific DSLs to facilitate the development of business units under the hexagonal architecture:

• Proteo: This DSL is used to define the business model. Proteo allows developers to specify the structure and relationships of data within the business domain clearly and succinctly. By providing a precise model definition, Proteo ensures that all business rules and data structures are consistently applied throughout the application.

• Konos: Complementing Proteo, Konos is used to define the layers that interact with the model. It helps in setting up the ports and adapters that connect the business logic to external applications and services. Konos enables the efficient integration of these components, ensuring that they adhere to the predefined business model and rules.

Integration with Datahub

Integrating the hexagonal architecture with Intino’s Datahub requires the use of a publisher-subscriber model. This model is crucial for ensuring that changes within the business units are efficiently propagated across the system.

Business units within Intino can act as both publishers and subscribers, depending on the operational context. As publishers, they generate events. Conversely, as subscribers, they receive updates or data from other parts of the system, ensuring that each unit has access to the latest information necessary for its operations.

To support this dynamic interaction, the Datahub provides specialized accessors for both publishing and subscribing to the events that reach the Datahub. These events can be processed either in batch mode or in real time, following the principles of lambda architecture.

• Batch Layer: Processes large volumes of stored data in batches, creating comprehensive views that are ideal for in-depth analytics and reporting.
• Speed Layer: Handles real-time data processing as data arrives, ensuring immediate analysis and decision-making capabilities.

This mechanism ensures that all parts of the system remain synchronized and that data integrity is maintained across different units. To facilitate this interaction, the Datahub provides specific accessors for publishing and subscribing to events. These accessors enable business units to communicate changes in real-time or through scheduled batches, adapting to the needs of the system.