Hi all… thanks Markus for putting forward this proposal. That kind of “cloud-scale” modeling infrastructure is something that I have been thinking about for some time as well.
Since there seems there are many complex technical issues to build something like that, I’d propose we start by focusing on interfaces based on the initial requirements we know about, and back them up with naive/cheap but functional implementations, that even if they cannot operate at scale, they complied with the contract correctly (if we ignore the more demanding non-functional requirements). Maybe even a hackathon would be enough to take us to an initial toy-like implementation that addresses the first few critical use cases adequately and displays a sensible architecture.
That would allow us to start implementing clients for this repository, and allow us to find time/resources to replace the naive implementations with much improved ones that can actually provide the latency/reliability/throughput characteristics that would be really required for this kind of infrastructure later.
Another upside of this interface-centric approach is that it promotes a model that makes it easier to combine open-source and proprietary/commercial components.
Finally, of course, such interfaces will need to be revisited as time goes by, and we discover technical requirements that challenge the choices made so far, or even require things that used to be separated to be implemented together, or vice-versa.