WSO2 Micro Integrator Weds WSO2 API Manager…
WSO2 Micro Integrator and WSO2 API Manager are married now. The marriage took place in May with well wishes by many architects, managers and engineers. Hence, WSO2 MI and WSO2 APIM products cannot be presented as standalone entities anymore. Officially, they are bundled into a single installer and documentation also confirms that they are unified into a single platform going forward and called as APIM4. In this article, let’s briefly see what each is good at, the motivation behind this marriage and what are the benefits customers can get through it and how their future would look like..
Marriages happen if it a win win situation for both sides (agree?). Following are the features of each products which each other admired most from a long time back along their lifetime.
What is good in WSO2 MI
History of WSO2 MI goes all the way back to days of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator (WSO2 EI) and to WSO2 Enterprise (WSO2 ESB) service bus. WSO2 MI is considered as the integrator component under WSO2 EI 7.x series. Thus unarguably, WSO2 MI has a good name as a product renowned for integrating products and services among enterprises. It is lightweight, small in product size, has low startup time with a single configuration file — which makes it ideal for container based environments. Hence, we can state that it provides cloud native capabilities along with integration features. This makes WSO2 MI a good candidate to implement a system that follows Microservices architecture. Please refer to my article here to know how it follows 12 Factor App principles.
- WSO2 MI is an evolution of the same mediation runtime used at WSO2 ESB and WSO2 EI. Hence it is battle tested with practical use-cases.
- WSO2 Integration Studio — the editor (low code solution) enables developers and even citizen integrators to construct their mediation logic.
- Contains pre-built mediators for popular integration patterns like Guaranteed delivery, Scatter and Gather etc.
- WSO2 MI does not restrict customers to microservices architecture, it bares features required to host it with traditional monolith architecture as well (VM deployments)
- WSO2 MI has built ecosystem with hundreds of connectors which enables integrating with SaaS applications.
- Bares powerful data transformation tools inbuilt and testable through Integration Studio, the editor when you develop the integration logic.
- Support for various asynchronous messaging protocols like AMQP, MQTT, NATS, JMS integration
- Other features like monitoring, streaming integration, message tracing, events upon issues
What is good in WSO2 API Manager
WSO2 API manager is named as a leader in the Forrester Wave TM in Q3 2020. It is an APIM solution with tons of good features in it. I will briefly mention some of them as below.
- Easily and securely expose APIs to both internal and external consumers.
- Enable design and runtime governance for the entire lifecycle of your APIs.
- Get business insights and intelligence through APIs.
- Flexible deployment models adapt to your infrastructure while keeping service discovery seamless for developers.
- Support modern services including REST, GraphQL, and Async API, and integrate your API workflows with your CI/CD pipeline.
Love Story of MI and APIM
With the growth of API manager concepts, exposing the integration to the outside world was architecturally decoupled from implementation of the integration. However, they cannot be separated from each other. They are naturally glued together.
When constructing a complete integration system that is exposed to the outside developers need integration features as well as API management features.
There are two major approaches for developing an integration solution used by enterprises to follow API led integration.
- Integration first approach — develop the integration first and then expose it through managed APIs to provide an omnichannel experience to the users.
- API first approach — design how and what information systems should share first and design APIs (i.e Open API definition etc). Secondly, implement the integration logic for the contract given by the APIs using integration layer.
In either approach, both integration and API management is involved. The factor to consider is that they are separate layers in the same platform which sits next to each other. They should be able to separately scaled, managed and deployed.
Thus APIM admires features provided by MI while MI admires the features provided by APIM. This “love” will last as long as integration industry lasts…
Motivation behind the marriage
Like for any marriage, the motivation for this marriage is also nothing but love we talked above. As WSO2 MI and WSO2 APIM have matching ideas, parents decided to get them into a single platform — called APIM4.
APIM4 carries the good from both WSO2 MI and WSO2 APIM.
You can download WSO2 APIM4 from here. WSO2 MI also available at the same page under other components for download. There are some supportive components introduced to bring them under a same platform. For example, even if we could merely integrate the two products over the network, there was no way to make services deployed on WSO2 MI available to the APIM right away. For that we introduced an internal service registry to share service metadata between the two. In addition, streaming integration capability is also merged into the same platform (which is also available at other components for download). This makes APIM4 a complete solution to construct any type of integration and expose it for the consumers with correct monitoring, security, throttling and monetisation in place.
What we can expect
Following are some of the benefits customers can have out of APIM4 rather using WSO2 MI and WSO2 APIM separately.
- Easier procurement process as it is a single product
- Unified configuration experience as it is a single platform
- API Manager can automatically discover services in integration layer and generate APIs with a single click.
- Integration and API management ecosystems presented together
- Continuous integration and deployment made easy with a single product, reducing go-to-market time.
New features Introduced
APIM4 contains some new features that were not there with previous WSO2 MI or previous WSO2 APIM versions. In synopsis, they can be outlined as follows.
- Asynchronous API (AsyncAPI) support — Webhook, Websub,SSE
- Ability to expose messaging capabilities through Asynchronous APIs — ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ,Kafka
- API revisions support — no need to create new API versions to track changes anymore. You can create revisions of the same API versions and rollback to previous more easily upon issues.
- Cloud-based analytics — Fed up with setting up analytics and handling scalability? APIM4 offloads analytics to the cloud. Configure your on-premise system to upload analytics to WSO2 cloud and we will present the required insights.
- Centralised user management with external IDPs — Now you can configure APIM4 with external IDPs like Ping, Auth0 and Forgerock.
- Visualise Integrator deployments — APIM4 is equipped with a dashboard which enables cluster-wide management through a single dashboard.
- Develop your integration logics easier and faster — Integration Studio has been upgraded to the latest Eclipse platform. OpenAPI support, Docker and K8S project integrations are improved.
- Eco system improvements — Documentation improvements on Integration connectors, new connectors for file handling and CSV data transformations.
- Improved data transformation capabilities — Freemarker templates integration and Data mapper mediator now has nearly JVM performance.
How would future look like for APIM4
APIM4 is consolidating integration and API management capabilities together, which naturally needed by each other. For sure, it will give a number of benefits to the customers like we discussed above. As both components supports cloud native deployments, APIM4 is a good choice for customers as well as WSO2 to build a cloud platform on top of.
We wish both APIM and MI a very happy marriage for years to come — congratulations!!
Good luck APIM4…
