Prodspec and Annealing: Intent-Based Actuation for Google Production

Very nicely presented. The terminology here paints a easy to understand picture. There's an ideal form, & a solidication/realization of that intent. Annealing is a great word for the realization of an intent.

Semi sort of related, I notice a little passing similarity in Delos, Facebook's Log-Structured Protocol, comprised of two primary verbs that are sent around: apply, to apply an intent to the underlying platform, and sync, for the platform to report newer state up to the app.

Delos is not focused on this infrastructure topic, but it describes an intent-based system, where eventual resolution is expected. I could imagine using Delos or something like it as a way to actuate infrastructure in a similar manner to this paper. I also really enjoy a lot of the neat composability capabilities of Delos.

Kind of hard finding what to cite for Delos. There's dozens of submissions here on HN, but a lot of them are abstract only access, none have gotten much traction. https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi20/presentation/balakr... https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/11/23/log-structured-protoc... https://engineering.fb.com/2019/06/06/data-center-engineerin...