Application Integration, the new Google Cloud product! All you need to know to start using it
A few weeks ago, the “Application Integration” product became GA and is officially the Google Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPasS) product.
An iPass solution is mainly a cloud-based service that allows you to connect and integrate independent services for several use cases like orchestration, data transformation, …
Application Integration
You can access Application Integration as a separate product using the Console menu.
If you are using the new Apigee UI (fully integrated with Google Cloud Console), a sub-menu gives you access to Application Integration.
Let's start from the beginning and give the definition of Application Integration terminologies and concepts.
Application Integration terminologies and concepts
Like any other product or service, Application integration comes with some concepts and terminology defined below. This concept doesn’t cover Google Cloud concepts.
- Triggers — A trigger is the event that initiates the Task (def. below). You can read more about Triggers here.
- Tasks — A task is a well-defined unit of work in integration. For the list of all the available out-of-the-box tasks, You can see available out-of-the-box triggers and tasks here.
- Forks — A fork is a control point for the outgoing edges of a task. At the forks you will specify execution policy for the immediate next tasks.
- Join -A join is a control point for the incoming edges of a task. It lets you specify the execution strategy for the current task. You can have multiple tasks to run depending on conditions.
- Edge — An edge is a connection between any two elements in an integration with a specified direction. The connection can be between a trigger and a task or between a task and another task.
- Edge conditions — Edge conditions let you specify the conditions that must be validated to pass to the next task connected by the edge.
- Data Mapping — is the process of extracting and standardizing data from multiple sources, playing with them to build the target data fields.
- Variables — A variable has the same role as any other programming language or platform. It holds and transports data between the tasks, triggers, and edges of an integration. Integration variables are similar to variables used in a programming language.
- Integration versions — Versioning lets you improve or handle new use cases from an initial version of an Integration. When using the Editor, only one author can update an Integration at a time.
- Database persistence — Database persistence refers to the data/metadata saved during the execution of an integration. Database persistence is enabled By default.
- Connectors: is mainly one of the important functionality of Application Integration. Connectors let you connect to external data sources like BigQuery, sftp, Splunk, …. from your integrations. The complete list of connectors is available here
Google Cloud IAM
Before start using Application Integration, the question to ask is who can do what on Application Integration.
Application Integration as any other Google Cloud Service, relies on Cloud Identity and Cloud IAM.
The WHO could be:
- A Google Account (Gmail account)
- A Workspace Account
- A Service Account
- A Cloud Identity
Google Cloud proposes some “Predefined roles” for Application Integration:
- Application Integration Admin
- Application Integration Deployer
- Application Integration Editor
- Application Integration Invoker
- Application Integration Viewer
- Application Integration SFDC Instance Admin
- Application Integration SFDC Instance Editor
- Application Integration SFDC Instance Viewer
- Application Integration Approver
Don’t forget to create your custom role to enforce the least privilege principle if these roles are giving more permission than expected by your internal organization.
In this first article, the topic is to give you the new terminologies introduced by Application Integration. In a second article, I will show some use cases and how to build your first Application Integration.
