KODAKOne Dev: From stratus to cirrus

A development update for the KODAKOne platform

Dear KODAKOne Fans,

it is not easy to define the right time to tell about the development status and the overall architecture in our startup situation, so see this as the point where we just start somewhere. Even though we are already on the market with our European post licensing, the ongoing decision process for tools, technologies and best practices next to the rapidly moving technological evolution for cutting edge technologies in big data, advanced analytics and block chain is a fluent state in our agile platform development process.

30+ engineers across 6 teams are working on the platform

Right now we have 6 teams working on different topics to build our platform: The blockchain team managed by Armel, our backend team managed by Manuel, our platform team managed by Anzhelika, the big data team managed by Seif, our Data Science team managed by Emna and our integration team, managed by myself and Martin, all teams running in agile mode, not pure scrum, but like nexus with Atlassian support.

We had a lot of announcements over the last 2 months (please ignore the silence while SEC was inspecting our regulated ICO over 4 months from February till May). In the last couple of months, we initially came up with the ICO topic, an ERC20 token, then the KODAKOne Dollar round information and the business view on our platform as image rights management platform, followed by the OVG announcement with the rights clearance during sports events and just yesterday the partnership with Fernando Alonso.

Before I get into the details of our platform development, I need to clarify a few things:

1.     We are not using the ICO related ERC20 token in our KODAKOne Platform. This is a security token and not our platform utility, which we need to align our services on.

2.     We are developing our platform as an ecosystem with a private and a public visible blockchain part. 

3.     Our blockchain is used in a multi ledger architecture with different soft coupled or intelligent decoupled functional ledgers.

a.     One ledger for payments and all payment related transactions

b.     One ledger for licensing and all license, seal and asset related transactions

c.     One ledger for the identities and all identity, claim and authentication related transactions.

4.     Our multi ledger token architecture has one hybrid token, the KODAKCoin. It is a pure utility token.

5.     We are open for external blockchains to join our ecosystem by an open standardized API to make the connectivity as easy as possible. Important to say, that you need not to be one of our KODAKOne blockchain nodes, to use our services. 

6.     We are following the ODRL standard for our rights management information model for the rights management and rules framework. Everyone, who supports the ODRL will be able to interact with our platform for licensing and sealing requests.

7.     Our platform uses some pieces of two established blockchain technologies. 

a.     We are supporting the stellar protocol for any kind of payment transactions in the KODAKOne platform.

b.     We are using parts of Hyperledger to handle the licensing and on chain transactions and rules with Hyperledger Fabric and chain code in go.

8.     We plan to be flexible in the underlying blockchain technologies and will extend them later, to support other blockchain protocols as well and looking currently into NEM and EOS.

9.     We do not develop any kind of agency replacing system and it is not planned to take any part of the pure agency business into the platform. Our development goal is to support the creators, the image agencies and all related parties to make it crucial to license and pay and let all focus on the best content creation and publishing.

10.  We are not indenting to develop a normal image stock and not a normal cloud storage solution. Even if we are able to store plenty of Petabytes of image data, we are focusing on rights managed images or images, with a reasonable possibility to become a rights-managed and licensed image (or video later as well). To make this possible, we are doing as digital and automated due diligence of any platform content at the onboarding.

Product Development

With that being said, let’s dive into our platform development. As we have already the post licensing service up and running, we are working on a roadmap for our deployments that’s driven by business requirements and technology prerequisites (which is kind of obvious). We use cloud names like cumulus, cirrus, stratus, nimbus to indicate the maturity level of the developments where cumulus is the most near to the ground where we started, coming higher and higher to troposphere, where nearby everything is included in our so important atmosphere.

Our platform has to be able to handle a variety of tasks and services for photographers. Just a few examples:

?  We need data to help the users to make the right decisions.

?  We have to decide, which content is relevant for an image valuation, and we must be able to decide, if a creator is the owner of an image.

?  The platform must be able to detect forbidden content and fraud.

?  We are supposed to be a trustful environment for photographers and creatives around the world

?  And obviously our users will expect only useful hints about the blockchain, USCO, post licensing or platform registrations. Once, the marketplace will be available, as user I like to have recommendations for the next best offers or the next best actions in the platform with my registrations. Next to the blockchain and the advanced analytics, big data is required for each and every model training.

Nearly every KODAKOne component is built as a microservice and runs as KAFKA decoupled instance in Kubernetes dockers. So: KAFKA is probably the most important part in our TEC integration stack, we are relying on. Big data, AI and blockchains are using KAFKA as consumers and producers of data messages and trigger such microservices for the different KODAKOne platform services.

The governance for all services is managed by one of the most enterprise ready Hadoop implementations, MapR. MapR is giving us everything, we need to manage the kubernetes instances, the hybrid setup for cloud and on premise and the management for all digital assets in our streaming based scale out architecture. 

Post licensing is the first KODAKOne service, which will be included into the blockchain and the KODAKCoin as utility. To make this happen, we created the token structure for asset registration, licensing, ownership and payment information. The post licensing platform is currently under transition, which means, that the official KODAKOne website will integrate every module or service step by step. The UX will be one single user experience for each of the new KODAKOne services.

Get involved!

For me this was the first step to finally being able to share more publicly what we are working on at Wenn Digital to build our #KODAKOne platform. Nothing of this would be possible without the truly remarkable development teams and the amazing work with all departments and partners that are involved to make this happen.

Because this will be the first of many posts to come, I would like to hear what your thoughts are on our choices and the overall development of the platform. Well, actually any feedback is more than welcome.

Yours,

Volker