tutorial13 min read
What NASA Knew About If/Else That You Don't
In 1985, NASA built a rule engine called CLIPS. Forty years later, it still has lessons for every developer whose business logic is buried in procedural code.
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Your business, your partners, your customers, your regulators – always moving, never in sync, but the dots don't connect themselves.
Inferal is a data-native operating system for agents that watches what's happening across all your systems and acts the moment it matters, with every decision traced.
LLM agents need real-time context, not stale embeddings. Inferal activates agents with the precise facts that matter, when they matter.
Express business rules directly – no moving bytes around, no infrastructure code.
Clear intent, full auditability.
Unlike hardcoded workflows, rules respond to real conditions – not fixed tracks.
Systems adapt dynamically and have lower service failure rate.
Auditability
Data polling
Traditional databases have all the context but no agency or control over their workloads. Backends are difficult to reason about and are constrained by round-trip latency to data. Inferal transforms this into a coherent, performant and observable-by-design system.
Run in the cloud, in the data center, or on your laptop. Deployable to Kubernetes clusters.
Run workloads as close to the data as possible. Intent-driven capacity planning ensures compute and storage resources are neither under- nor over-utilized.
Databases speak query/response. Your agent asks, waits, gets an answer – always one step behind. Inferal flips this: it stays in sync with your data, matches rules continuously, and sends proceeds where they belong. No polling. No latency tax. No missed events.
Inferal connects to your databases and message queues, staying in sync with data at rest and data in motion. No polling, no stale cache – always the full picture.
Write rules in business terms – or plain English. They run continuously against all data, like standing orders that execute the moment patterns match.
When patterns match, agents get activated with the context they need. No querying, no waiting – data comes to them at exactly the right moment. Agents can even schedule their own re-activation by adding rules, within guardrails you define.
Proceeds flow back to where they belong: committed to databases, published to queues, sent to downstream services. Every action traced back to the rule and data that triggered it.
Traditional agents spend most of their time asking questions: polling stock prices, checking inventory levels, querying patient records, monitoring sensor data.
Learn about Agent Activation
Infrastructure tools like Kubernetes and Terraform let you describe what you want – replica counts, network configs, resource limits – instead of strict guidelines.
Learn about Infrastructure as Behavior
Financial systems generate thousands of transactions per second, each potentially triggering compliance checks, fraud detection, or risk calculations.
Learn about Risk and Compliance
Carrier rules, partner constraints, and compliance policies shift constantly. Exceptions multiply. Every decision needs explaining.
Learn about Logistics Decision LogicHow teams think about data, agents, and real-time decisions.
What stands out about Inferal is how directly their approach translates into faster execution and lower complexity, making it the kind of platform that quietly becomes infrastructure you do not want to operate without.
Michel Pelletier
Founder at OneSparse
If the data is the source of truth, then business decisions should be made as close to it as possible. Inferal lets you push your business rules right to the data itself. It's the easiest and most complete way to achieve a truly data driven business process.
Nisan Haramati
Co-Founder at Graphium Labs
We monitor DNA sequences, protein data, antibody assays – and need to act on new relationships continuously. Inferal executes rules close to the database, giving us a fast way to alert AI agents and researchers.
Morten Krogh
CTO at Bionamic
Clearly the future for rule-based agentic behavior for all verticals. Everyone else is using agents in a reactive way and Inferal is using them proactively.
Sean Magin
Software Engineer
The database sees everything going in and out, but it usually just stores it. Inferal turns those changes into instant actions without adding a bunch of extra systems.
Rob Pankow
ceo @ simpylblock
Agentic is the most exciting shift I've seen in years. I can't wait to build these workflows for our clients. Inferal lives in their data stack – enabling us to deliver efficient solutions fast.
Olena Tkhorovska
CEO at Pieoneers
In an era where source code became a commodity, being able to get exactly the data you want in real-time is the moat you need to develop powerful agents. Inferal Relay provides this moat for us.
Krisztián Szabó
Founding Engineer at Marketer.com
In 1985, NASA built a rule engine called CLIPS. Forty years later, it still has lessons for every developer whose business logic is buried in procedural code.
The principle everyone agrees on. The application everyone gets wrong. What if data and code were never separate concerns?
What happens when your data system has no idea what you're going to do with the answer.
We're partnering with forward-thinking teams for early access. Build with us before general availability.