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Interactive Network Technologies, Inc. (INT) Integrates Bluware Corp. Volume Data Store (VDS) into IVAAP

INT and Bluware are partnering to empower their upstream clients with true lossless, serverless storage and advanced data visualization in the cloud.

HOUSTON, TX – May 4, 2020 – Interactive Network Technologies, Inc. (INT) a leader in advanced domain visualization in digital exploration and production (E&P) and Bluware Corp., the digital platform that enables the oil and gas industry to accelerate digital transformation initiatives and adopt cloud computing for subsurface data, are pleased to announce the integration of Volume Data Store (VDS), a data format with adaptive streaming technology for seismic data storage, into IVAAP, an upstream data visualization platform. 

IVAAP is an HTML5 data visualization and collaborative platform for large Geoscience and petrophysical data sets in the cloud that empowers product owners, developers, and architects to accelerate the delivery of subsurface digital solutions for oil and gas. Deployable in any cloud environment (Azure®, GCP®, AWS®), IVAAP can scale to meet the needs of tens to thousands of users.

“Companies are pushed to the extreme in terms of remote collaboration and access, and, especially in the case of seismic visualization, finding the right tool to handle large datasets in the cloud can be even more challenging,” says Dr. Olivier Lhemann, President and Founder of INT. “Partnering with Bluware means INT can offer our clients true serverless, lossless storage to visualize their upstream data in the cloud.”

Bluware VDS manages all types of seismic data, including pre-stack, post-stack, WAZ, and more as demanded by an organization’s business needs, workflows, and infrastructure requirements. It can also transfer legacy formats such as SEG-Y or SEP using advanced on-the-fly transcoding on-premise or in the cloud.

“Bluware VDS cloud-native seismic data environment will provide customers with quick, cost-effective, remote access to their data, which is becoming imperative for organizations,” says Dan Piette, CEO at Bluware.

Read the press release on PRWeb >

About Bluware Corp.

Bluware enables oil and gas companies to solve the most challenging objectives in the petrotechnical world. E&P companies use Bluware to achieve previously unthinkable workflows using cloud computing, and artificial intelligence for subsurface data applications and workflows. For more information, visit www.bluware.com.

What Is Kubernetes?: An Introduction and Overview of the Popular Platform

Over the last several years, Kubernetes has been a developing trend in the tech world, gaining popularity as more and more companies begin to take advantage of cloud-based services. As a non-developer living in a developer world, I wanted to understand more about why we develop our software to work with Kubernetes. So I sat down with INT’s Senior Product Manager Steven Reynolds and Senior Architect James Velasco to learn more about Kubernetes and the advantages of working with it.

Christin: So, Steven, tell me — what in the world is Kubernetes??

Steven: Kubernetes is described as an orchestration platform. It’s usually associated with getting big software up and running. For example, with some of our clients, we have our build set up so that all of the software assets are pushed out and deployed using Kubernetes which takes care of monitoring (pods). If a pod fails, Kubernetes will restart it, and it has nice hooks that can spin up new pods if there’s too much work for one pod to handle.

Christin: What are the advantages of using Kubernetes?

James: Traditionally, you have a service provided by a server. If you migrated, changed, or updated the service, there would be a lot of work to change or configure, set up the new server providing it, and with cloud and cloud providers like AWS, they are moving to automating things. So instead of manually going in and doing all of it, you have tools to automate updating an old version, and switching over to the new one automatically.

Christin: The term microservices is used with Kubernetes — can you go into what microservices does?

James: Microservices is an architectural trend happening right now. Instead of having one big server running everything for a web service, you may have that same web service decomposed into little servers that do separate, well defined parts.

Steven: So the idea of Kubernetes and microservice are different concepts, but they’re talked about together. When using a microservice architecture, it’s an advantage, but it’s also a headache to keep track of all the components.

Christin: So when is it best to use Kubernetes?

Steven: We have 15 to 20 services, and it’s a headache to manage, but you can use Kubernetes to help organize it and help it be more manageable for human beings. There are trade-offs because it makes it better to manage, but there are many tradeoffs as in anything else. It’s the engineer’s dilemma.

James: It tends to only be an advantage if you’re managing a lot of services. So if you’re just managing one or two, then it’s iffy. But if you’re managing 10+ or even just 4 or 5 and those 4 or 5 are made up of 10 or 15 subparts, that is when it makes sense. If I divided all my services like that I may have 10 or 20 and then you may have other vendors or services and you can literally have 100 to 200 of these things. You have to swap out in a unique order and all need to come up and down and all need to be monitored, so that’s what Kubernetes helps you do. Kubernetes is also great to scale up or down.

Christin: That’s really cool. So, Steven mentioned that we have built projects to run on Kubernetes. Does that mean IVAAP can be supported on Kubernetes if requested?

James: Kubernetes is one of the environments that IVAAP targets, if a client requests it. It’s important that we do support it because it is one of the modern deployment styles. And it is common that clients use IVAAP running on Kubernetes. Some clients use Azure or AWS so we have to make sure we can run in all different environments.

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So there you have it. As a growing trend in software development, Kubernetes can be a better way for companies to deploy and maintain software quickly, especially in a cloud environment. For INT, supporting Kubernetes is an important aspect of how we help meet the needs of our many diverse clients. For more information on IVAAP, check out int.com/ivaap or schedule a demo with one of our team.


Bridging the Gap Between Business and IT: Visualization Architecture in the Digital Oilfield

A Closer Look at IVAAP

Thierry Danard, VP of Core Platform Technologies

In our latest Tech Talk, E&P Visualization in the Cloud, we featured IVAAP, our cloud-enabled visualization and analytics development platform. We showed how it can be used to monitor and analyze well data as a critical part of your digital transformation.

Thierry Danard, our VP of Core Platform Technologies, presented some of the technical aspects of IVAAP, so we asked him a few questions after the talk to dig a bit deeper:

> Hi, Thierry! We already know that you are the brains behind INTViewer, so which part of IVAAP are you responsible for?

I mostly work on the “P” part of IVAAP, the “platform.” IVAAP can be customized fully, both on the browser side and on the backend side. I focus on the backend side, meaning the microservices on the data side.

> What makes the IVAAP platform unique?

IVAAP comes with a Software Development Kit (SDK) so geoscience developers can tailor our solution to their needs. Developing solutions for the cloud is hard. We want to facilitate the work of these developers. The SDK is designed to ease the challenges developers face when developing distributed solutions.

But developers are not the only customers of IVAAP within IT. Deploying cloud solutions is also hard, and infrastructure folks want options when it comes to deployment. We made the IVAAP platform container-agnostic so that it can be deployed in a highly distributed environment or using standalone servers without changes: This is the same microservice code running.

IVAAP is unique because it bridges the gap between the business and IT: It provides a common platform that both sides can embrace, not just end-users.

 

SDK-architecture-ivaap
SDK Architecture

 

> Can you give us examples of containers that IVAAP works on?

The most widely used container for the IVAAP backend is Play. This is a high-velocity web framework designed to run on multiple machines, in a distributed fashion.

Another one is Apache Tomcat, the most widely used standalone Java application server. Other well-known JavaEE application servers are Oracle Glassfish and WebLogic.

> Why might a developer choose Tomcat over Play?

Not every customer has a network of machines to dedicate to well monitoring or analysis. Depending on what you use IVAAP for, you might not need distributed processing.

But developers also benefit. Developers can use the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that they already use; it already works with Tomcat. No need to use a special environment, no need to install special plugins or to configure several servers. Developers can be productive from day one. The promise of IVAAP is to accelerate the delivery of geoscience, drilling and production cloud-enabled solutions. You can’t accelerate these deliveries unless your developers are productive.

The IVAAP Approach

 

> How does the SDK help developers create distributed microservices?

The IVAAP backend API makes a large use of the Akka library. Akka is a toolkit for building highly concurrent, distributed applications. The core Java programming model makes it very difficult for cloud developers to implement distributed processing. The Akka library addresses this concern with its simple model based on actors and messages.

Akka and Play are designed to work together. When Akka code is deployed in Play, you can sustain heavy loads. For example, the Akka actor system might decide to delegate individual processing units to one or several machines. This is virtually transparent to the developer as this is a behavior that depends on the state of each server.

> How does the SDK help developers create efficient microservices?

The API of the SDK is designed from the ground up to favor asynchronous execution over synchronous execution.

Synchronous code tends to reserve lots of resources just to wait for an answer. Asynchronous code doesn’t reserve these resources while a long processing task is being performed. Less CPU and less memory usage means more processing power for each deployed server, allowing your solution to perform under heavy loads.

> What’s coming next for the IVAAP backend?

Now that we made it easy to add new data sources and new microservices, we are adding connectivity to even more data repositories, such as OSISoft PI, Procount, or Peloton. This is a typical use case of the backend API. We have cleanly separated the microservices and data access parts. Now it’s just a matter of plugging additional data sources.

Stay tuned for more interviews with our developers! In the meantime, click here to learn more about IVAAP.