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Introduction To Virtuoso

In The Beginning, There Were Packages

Virtuoso represents general purpose composable no-code infrastructure designed to enable optimum Golden Paths for a variety of workflows. Virtuoso also represents a digital ecosystem with complex requirements that are shared by other ecosystems. During the development of Virtuoso, it became overwhelmingly apparent that Virtuoso, as a digital ecosystem, had infrastructure requirements that were shared by other digital ecosystems. As a result, Montage was built as a separate infrastructure. It is designed to provide general-purpose modularity, discoverability, and orchestration for two-sided digital ecosystems and, crucially, also provide digital economy infrastructure. The first foundational concept of Montage is the generic notion of packages and ecosystems. The Montage infrastructure is not understood until the value of generic notions of packages and ecoysstems is understood.

Montage consists of a package technology that is explicitly designed to be adaptable to any ecosystem to support the concept of "packaged capabilities" in Gartner's composable business architecture. Some characteristics of Montage packages:

  • Montage packages should be compatible with any existing package technology (Nuget, Maven, pip, ec.)
  • Montage packages are laid out as contents of a root folder with three subfolders.
  • The "Payload" folder in this root folder contains any content to be governed, orchestrated, and notionally delivered or installed. 
  • The "Montage" folder contains package metadata used by Montage in the orchestration of the package. This layer of orchestration is general purpose orchestration in common with all digital ecosystems.
  • The "Ecosystem" folder contains package metadata used by the ecosystem's extension of Montage for orchestration of the package.
  • Packages form dependencies on other packages
  • Packages can belong to one or more ecosystems
  • Packages evolve over time, and are versioned
  • Package version notations can vary from ecosystem to ecosystem
  • Package version dependency notations can vary from ecosystem to ecosystem
  • How packages are installed varies from ecosystem to ecosystem
  • Governance must be applied to packages at the time of orchestration

The last point is perhaps key to understanding the necessity of Montage as an infrastructure layer. Teams setting out to create a Golden Path will fail if they have a so-called "Day 1" infrastructure mindset. The Golden Path requires "Day 100+" infrastructure mindset, thinking about the infrastructure as delivering value not just on Day 1 of project execution, but covering the entire sofware development process lifecycle. Montage provides concurrent governance and orchestration of packaged capabilities through highly extensible infrastructure that is adaptable to arbitrary workflows.

There are more concepts to be introduced related to Montage, but with these basics we can begin to describe the Virtuoso infrastructure. 

 

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