Architecture

Wrangling applications moated by their features with portholes bolted on to let the outside world in and out creates a lot of issues when multiple applications compete for supremacy. The complexity explodes as the count of applications that you need to wire data through and connect together into cohesive workflows increases.

Tranquil inverts the formula of compounding complexity.

Hub and Spoke Architecture

Apps connecting to other apps creates a tight coupling. Each app needs to know about the idiosyncrasies of the other app. Adding additional apps can also create significant timing issues with no particular app claiming responsibility for.

When preceding along this path a business automation ecosystem soon resembles a mesh architecture. With none of the nodes having responsibility for coordinating the system as a unit.

With a hub and spoke architecture the “hub” is special node that handles all the inter-application communications, orchestration of tasks, and sequencing of events. Applications are decoupled from each other, don’t even know the other apps exist, and their only responsibility to and from outside of their domain is to consume or produce events.

This architecture...hyperbole warning...dramatically reduces cognitive load and system complexity by handling communications, orchestration, and sequencing the same way — for every app. The only snowflake part of this architecture is the last mile to wire up any particular application.

Inversion of Responsibilities

The mesh architecture (and the inherent chaos) evolves organically from relying on scripts and glue code mechanisms that live in and between applications. These options exist in every app making them the easiest first approach to solve problems with. Which works great for quick wins but their scaling complexity curve quickly spirals out of control as quick wins accumulate while assuming they are foundational building blocks. They are not foundational, they are decorative.

Tranquil moves the code mechanisms above applications. Instead of relying on the scripting and connecting features of apps to pull the outside world in to manipulate, Tranquil’s “hub” approach takes on that responsibility. Leaving each app to do its dedicated things without a care of how the outside world does their dedicated things.

Tranquil does only a handful of core things — with the same approach, many times over.

Tranquil adds a known chunk of centralized complexity to remove a whole host of scattered complexity across disparate data stores and apps. The result is keeping each dedicated node in their lane and putting all automation related stuff in Tranquil where the cognitive load is the same no matter how many nodes and automations you add to your ecosystem.

Bringing the Browser to the Code

Tranquil embeds apps in workflows. Everyone else embeds workflows in apps.

We created a browser in a full programming IDE environment. Which we “business-fied” for general users while keeping the power user and programming capabilities.

This approach unlocks developing business automation tasks across all of your business apps. And a safe environment for your users to run them.