Sugar Gateway

Had a great meeting with a potential partner earlier this year to discuss a complex customer requirement.

In summary, with reference to Figure 1.

• The end-user is the “bring your own yellow sweet wrapper” on the left
• The back-office has 5 sugar cubes
• Meta data about the sugar grains within the cubes is aggregated into an upturned sugar bowl
• The upturned sugar bowl feeds a subset of the meta-data to a remote scrunched-up ball of paper
• The comms between scrunched-up paper and sugar bowl are un-reliable
• The scrunched-up paper and sweet wrapper are in an un-trusted environment, so can only have the absolute minimum data needed
• The user needs to search the sugar cubes for a specific sugar grain
• When found the grain of sugar needs to be securely transported to the sweet wrapper
• The user is not entitled brown sugar, so this need to be filtered
• A some point in time a golden nugget (small sugar cube) may come on-line that matches an old search, so the sweet wrapper needs to be informed

Figure 1

The coffee cup, nothing to do with the scenario, but without it, would not have had sugar on the table!

Anyway, looks like we have a good solution with this partner. But if you have an alternative suggestions please let me know in the comment fields below.