Craig Burton

Ok. So a provider abstraction layer architecture isn’t exactly new. But it seems we have forgotten its significance. Almost all of the architectures coming out for the web are silos. From the Google App Engine to the Twitter. These services are only accessible from applications that write specifically to those services. Why is that? No abstraction layer.

Let me give you an example. When Novell decided to become a hardware independent operating system vendor, a driver for every network adapter had to be hand written. Finally someone inside said “enough, let’s ‘abstract’ this thing.”

Of course, only an engineer talks like that, but it takes an engineer—for the most part—to think like that. But this event was significant for all involved. It meant that Novell was able to free up significant engineering resources by pushing out the responsibility for making a NIC (Network Interface Card) work to the manufacturer of the NIC. This is as it should be.

For all of you historical buffs, the notion of the NIC abstraction was so important that Novell and Microsoft/3Com had a huge fight over whose abstraction design would win out. Microsoft/3Com  won that battle, as it should have. The abstraction is known as NDIS (Network Driver Interface Specification).

Ok enough for now. There is much more to say about this. hehe. Can’t wait.