A few years ago, I announced on this blog that Kynetx was done. But the platform we'd created, the Kynetx Rules Engine, or KRE, lived on. Today I am annoucing that KRE is dead too. We shut it down last week.

Despite the demise of Kynetx, the platform continued to be open and available. Fuse was still running on it and my students were using it for class and research. But Fuse stopped working for good last spring when the MVNO we were using to process cellular data from the car devices shut down. And the new pico engine is working so well that we use it for everything now.

KRE was started in 2007 and envisioned as a cloud-based programming platform for events. While we had several different uses for it over the years, the focus on cloud-based program evaluation never changed. KRE was a PaaS play and so we built it with the idea that it would be a big chunk of infrastructure that we maintained for use by our customers.

Back at iMall in the 90's, Steve Fulling, Wade Billings, Mark Horstmeier, Cid Dennis, and I developed a core competancy around running big server farms. And AWS was still a fairly new thing. So, we built KRE using Dell servers, Linux, virtual servers, Puppet, and other technology we were familiar with. When we built iMall, not many people could do this well and we got good at running large infrastructure. So when Kynetx started up, that was our natural path. If I were doing it today, or even just 5 years ago, I'd do it on AWS.

Over the past 10 years, KRE has operated day in and day out without fail. The only time it's been offline is when we had to physically move the servers from one data center to another. Turning off KRE and retrieving the servers is the final step in the long, exciting dance that was Kynetx. A few weeks ago I realized that the platform I'd poured my soul into for the last 10 years was no longer needed. But the ideas that it spawned live on in the pico engine. Shutting it down is bittersweet, but I'm excited for the future.