Flow Architectures

The 10-Year Impact of the World Wide Flow

Note

This article assumes that fictional flow standards, the Event Metadata Protocol and the Event Subscription Interface—collectively known as the Internet Event Flow Suite—was introduced in 2021 and adopted by a number of tech companies. This created the platform by which Event Flow Protocol became standard tooling that sent and received data streams (including events).

The article purposely avoids talking about the specifics of how the Internet Event Flow Suite works. It notes that the Event Metadata Protocol (which is modeled on the CNCF Cloud Events Protocol) is an event data protocol, and that the Event Subscription Interface enables consumers to subscribe to streams (which is loosely based on today’s MQTT and NATS.io subscription application program interfaces [APIs]). Again, the article avoids discussing specifics, as they are not critical to the outcomes described here.

San Francisco (2034)—Ten years ago this month, the Internet Event Flow Suite, or IEFS, standard was introduced by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The world economy has undergone significant changes in the decade since. From powerful new online services to fundamental changes in the way business has been automated, the World Wide Flow (WWF) has had great impact—both good and bad—on the way our world works. We thought it would be fun to look at some of the incredible technologies and services enabled by the WWF, ...