Google today made available an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) capable of invoking a range of methods to integrate applications.
Initially developed for the Apigee application programming interface (API) management platform Google acquired in 2016, the Application Integration service can now, for example, also consume a publish and subscribe event or an event driven through a Salesforce platform.
Amit Zavery, vice president and general manager for Google Platform, said the Application Integration service provides IT organizations with all the benefits of an iPaaS without requiring them to stand up and manage an integration platform themselves.
The Google Application Integration service also provides access to a Visual Integration Designer tool that can be used to build workflows using a low-code tool. In total, there are now more than 75 connectors that can be used to integrate multiple Google Cloud services and third-party platforms that can run in either a cloud or on-premises IT environment, said Zavery.
In general, visual tools are transforming how integrations are created and expanded within organizations, noted Zavery. Rather than using lower-level procedural code, a visual tool enables developers to employ low-code to create integrations. That makes it simpler to collaborate with business users that can now more easily participate in developing workflows.
In fact, in some cases, business users, otherwise known as citizen developers, have enough technical acumen to create their own workflows using low-code tools.
There are, naturally, going to be plenty of complex integration challenges that will require procedural code, but the bulk of the integrations required today are not especially complex.
Regardless of who creates the integration, the number of them being employed across an enterprise organization continues to increase as more digital business transformation initiatives are launched. Developers are not going to be able to keep pace with the demand for those integrations if they rely solely on procedural code. The only way to effectively reduce the backlog for integrations is to rely more on visual tools to construct them. In most cases, the integration being created is relatively trivial. The only reason it wasn’t created sooner is there are not enough developers available to complete that task using procedural code.
There are, of course, no shortage of iPaaS options available. As more workloads are deployed in the cloud, Google is betting the center of gravity for integration will shift toward the places where modern microservices-based workloads are deployed to reduce overall latency.
It’s not clear whether organizations still view integration as an afterthought versus employing an integration platform around which all applications revolve. That latter approach tends to reduce the total cost of integration when compared to using multiple point products that are not managed via single framework, noted Zavery.
Ultimately, IT teams that adopt an iPaaS are able to focus more on higher-value IT tasks. The issue is determining which integration projects really require professional developers with lots of integration expertise and which, via a low-code tool, can be handled by almost any developer.