Summary: What Harry has and hasn't got

So far we have looked at what makes a Jtrix node. There is much else which goes on top, and we will look at this shortly. Meanwhile, here is how we have addressed Harry's needs from Section . This is what he has got from Jtrix so far:

Resources, resource control, monitoring and auditing: These all help the management part of the managed services he needs. The auditing helps the ISP charge accurately and therefore competitively, and this has a knock-on effect to the ASPs and to Harry himself. Costs are realistic.

Service binding, descriptors, warrants and security: These all allow managed services to be widely available, and for ISPs to have peace of mind from the security controls. They contribute to more flexible, faster hosting. The ease of binding to services helps smooth growth and evolution, scalability and the addition of more resources (which are represented by services). Their distributed nature contributes to reliability. The information contained in descriptors and warrants helps netlets, nodes and services agree how and what service netlets should be used deployed, allowing flexibility and adaptivity. And because the key connectivity is handled by nodes, while service-specific operations are dictated by the service's own netlets, integration costs for ASPs and consumers are low and they can both afford to be more competitive.

Nodes spanning machines: This contributes to the potential scalability of applications and services, and similarly the ability to increase resources and their reliability. By being built in to the system it also allows ASPs and other service providers to reduce costs when developing always-available systems.

Basic discovery services: This aids netlets in finding alternative services.

Flexibility: This is key in allowing anyone to enter the market for services, always ensuring Harry is not locked into a monopoly and reducing his costs. The choice of a platform-independent language means that flexible hosting is a reality for him.

Yet all this does not make a complete system. We have the basics of scalability, flexible hosting and reliability, but it is still cumbersome. Certainly the concept of money changing hands is not addressed. All this is covered in the next level up. The services...