More and more enterprises are managing distributed infrastructures and applications that need to share data. This data sharing can be viewed as data flows that connect (and flow through) multiple applications. Applications are partly managed on-premise, and partly in (multiple) off-premise clouds.

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) the need to share data between applications, sensors, infrastructure and people (specifically on the edge) will only increase. This raises fundamental questions on how we develop scalable distributed systems: How to manage the flow of events (data flows)? How to facilitate a frictionless integration of new components into the distributed systems and the various data flows in a scalable manner? What primitives do we need, to support the variety of protocols?

One way to think about distributed systems is through the concept of a shared (distributed) data fabric. The goal of the fabric is to offer an infrastructure platform to develop and connect applications without applications having to (independently) implement sets of basic primitives like security, guaranteed delivery, routing of messages, etc... and free up time of the developer to focus on the core functionality of the application.

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