Evolved Architecture for Scale, Consent, and Interoperability in Inrupt’s Version 2.0 Release
This week we announced the general availability of the version 2.0 release of Inrupt’s Enterprise Solid Server (ESS).
To allow for more robust scaling, availability, and performance, this release represents major architectural changes to ESS in order to support a number of new organizations and use cases. ESS 2.0 also represents an exciting milestone for Solid, Inrupt, and ESS as this release will go into production for millions of users and the large concurrent workloads.
Working in direct collaboration and response to their needs of deploying Solid to the citizens of Flanders, Digital Vlaanderen has been a vital partner as we’ve built 2.0 and continue to evolve our products:
“We are really depending on the new version of Inrupt’s ESS software - V2.0 release. We are now using key features from the latest release like Access Grants and Access Requests and the decoupled WebID service capability for crucial service interactions where data consumers and data providers are interacting with a Solid Pod. As the only enterprise Solid implementation that is a secure and privacy-by-design built production ready server, it allows us to operate under demanding SLAs.” - David Van den Brande, Enterprise Architect & CTO Datanutsbedrijf, Digital Vlaanderen
This article highlights what we believe to be a major and monumental release as well as some of the features of V2.0 of Inrupt’s Enterprise Solid Server.
Enterprise-grade Solid solutions at scale
The following features were developed and integrated into version 2.0 to accommodate for the production-grade readiness expected by Inrupt’s enterprise customers and their millions of users.
Scale and Performance
ESS has evolved its architecture so that customers can build robust and scalable deployments of ESS to support tens millions of users and concurrent user transactions, while maintaining the highest levels of security and performance expected from commercial products.
Access Requests & Access Grants
ESS 2.0 introduces Access Requests and Access Grants, which allow applications and entities to request access to data on a Pod. Pod Owners may authorize, reject, and revoke these requests. This gives applications and organizations the ability to request access to data directly from people and with their consent. In turn, people have fine-grained control over who has access to their data and how it is used. This creates transparency for users to understand who has access to their data. Additionally, Access Grants are timed-based - providing temporary or fixed period access as well as an audit trail via the Access Grant history. Finally, Access Grants provide the technical capability to build consent models that are appropriate for geographic data protection regulations, like GDPR.
Standalone WebID Service
In previous versions of ESS, Identities and Pods were tightly coupled. This meant that there was a one to one mapping between Pods and WebID’s. These components have been decoupled in ESS 2.0. This allows for one WebID to be mapped to multiple Pods which provides flexibility for distributed data storage.
Improved Data Interoperability
Version 2.0 will introduce the Artifact Generator, which is a developer tool for generating and extending linked data vocabularies. The Artifact Generator allows Data Architects to define data models and enables applications interoperability by providing the same linked data models across multiple programming languages and client implementations.
Momentum toward an exciting Future
These new capabilities, coupled with existing ESS functionality, enable organizations around the globe to leverage the power of Solid. More and more, governments and companies are committing to renewing innovation with dynamic products and services built on Solid. It is exciting to witness this momentum.
As always, I am ever eager to see what will come of our continued progress and the innovations Solid will inspire for enterprises and individuals alike. For a full list of ESS capabilities along with the new 2.0 functionality, visit the Inrupt documentation and release notes.
