Integration is becoming an integral part of software development as the applications driving today’s digital businesses combine data, events, and services from within the organisation, throughout ecosystems, and across devices. As a result, IT organisations increasingly need to adopt a range of integration styles and architectural integration models while keeping pace with agile app development. WSO2 addresses this demand with the introduction of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.0, the open-source, cloud-native, hybrid integration platform for APIs, data, and event streams.

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.0 has been extensively re-architected for the requirements of modern software development. It is the only solution that provides a choice of approaches for either code-driven or graphical configuration-driven integration, plus a choice of styles for decentralised microservices, cloud-native, or centralised enterprise service bus (ESB) style architectures. The platform is the first to use a code-driven approach to integration through the Ballerina programming language, enabling developers to apply agile methodologies to integration for the first time.

Key components of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.0 include:

• New Ballerina Integrator, a new cloud-native integration framework that brings a powerful, simple-to-learn, code-driven approach to programming integrations
• Re-architected Micro-Integrator, an integration engine for centralised ESB-style, cloud-native, and/or microservices-style configuration-driven integration, with a graphical drag-and-drop integration flow designer
• New Streaming Integrator for integrating event-driven systems and mediating event streams
• Enhanced Analytics and Observability through support for leading third-party analytics packages, such as Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK Stack
• Enhanced Tooling options for both code-driven or graphical drag-and-drop, configuration-driven integration
• New Native Kubernetes Support to enable cloud-native deployments using any WSO2 Enterprise Integrator runtime

With WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.0, enterprise application development and integration teams now have the functionality in a single, hybrid integration platform to help them adopt emerging best practices for delivering modern, distributed cloud-native applications.

“Using centralised integration delivery teams of specialists who build flows on an ESB is insufficient when faced with streaming analytics, hybrid cloud environments, software as a service (SaaS), agile architecture and process automation,” according to the Gartner report, Essential Skills for Modern Integration Architecture¹. The report further notes that “Cloud platforms, modern application architecture and new data processing techniques require you to create more integration flows in less time. To accomplish this, application technical professionals must learn the API, agile and cloud integration skills identified in this research.”

“WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.0, the first platform to leverage the Ballerina language, offers a revolutionary approach to closing the integration gaps often left by traditional ESBs in supporting modern, cloud-native app development,” said Paul Fremantle, WSO2 CTO and co-founder. “Whether connecting services, events or data, developers now have the flexibility to configure or code integrations into their work; adopt agile approaches to integration; and begin to merge the worlds of development, integration, and DevOps.”

Cloud-Native Integration for Modern Apps

With version 7.0, WSO2 Enterprise Integrator offers three cloud-native runtimes to support the primary forms of integration required in building the applications that power digital businesses.

Ballerina Integrator

Ballerina Integrator is the new cloud-native integration framework that brings a powerful, simple-to-learn, code-driven approach to programming integrations. Based on the Ballerina 1.0 programming language that launched in September 2019, it includes the Ballerina runtime; connectors for SaaS, business-to-business solutions, and other protocols; and extensions to optimise Ballerina for integration projects.

Ballerina Integrator simplifies integration by offering high-level abstractions to represent services, endpoints, and network data types, while providing a sequence diagram-based visualisation of interactions. Since Ballerina is a programming language, developers can apply agile methodologies to integration and speed the development time of integration projects. Additionally, they can leverage the language’s higher-level abstractions to quickly integrate applications rather than spend time writing boilerplate code.

Micro-Integrator

Micro-Integrator is the optimised and enhanced runtime that incorporates technology from components of the WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 6.X generation, including WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus and WSO2 Data Services Server. It includes a broadly-adopted, open-source integration engine for centralised ESB-style, cloud-native, and/or microservices-style integration. Micro-Integrator also offers an intuitive graphical drag-and-drop integration flow designer along with a configuration-based runtime starts up significantly faster and features native integration with Docker and Kubernetes.

Streaming Integrator

Streaming Integrator, the new runtime for integrating event-driven systems and mediating event streams, is based on the open source Siddhi engine for stream processing and complex event processing (CEP). It can be utilised in any integration scenario that requires some form of event stream processing, and it works seamlessly with Micro-Integrator.

Functionality for Building, Deploying and Managing Integrations

Complementing the runtime servers in WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.0 are a range of tools and capabilities to facilitate building, deploying, and managing integrations.

Tooling to Build Integrations

Tooling provided with Ballerina Integrator includes an integration development tool based on the Visual Studio Code source-code editor, integration templates, and pre-built enterprise integration patterns and samples.

Micro-Integrator is supported by Integration Studio, which offers a graphical drag-and-drop experience for building integrations along with seamless integration of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Additionally, it provides code-driven integration tooling based on Visual Studio Code for developers who prefer this approach.

Native Support for Kubernetes Deployments

All components of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.0 natively support Kubernetes. With Ballerina Integrator, developers can simply annotate a service with the required Kubernetes deployment specification. Meanwhile, both Micro-Integrator and Streaming Integrator offer Kubernetes operators to seamlessly run integrations on Kubernetes.

 New and Enhanced Features for Managing Integrations

At the center of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.0 capabilities for managing integrations are the new out-of-the-box observability capabilities for collecting metrics, as well as logging, tracing and visualising messages. These are provided through multiple tools, including ELK, Prometheus, Grafana and Jaeger.

Most IT organisations already have preferred solutions for analytics and business process management (BPM). Therefore, WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.0 has been enhanced to support the use of third-party applications, such as Prometheus, Grafana and ELK for analytics, and Camuda for BPM. Additionally, existing customers can use the latest versions of the Integration Analytics and WSO2 Business Process Server components of WSO2 Enterprise Server 6.X, which WSO2 will continue to support and update.

 Availability and Support

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.0 is now available. Additionally, WSO2 will continue to enhance and support its WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 6.X generation. As fully open source solutions released under the Apache License 2.0, the WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.0 and 6.X software releases do not carry any licensing fees.

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator is backed by WSO2 Subscription, which features access to WSO2 Update for continuous delivery of bug fixes, security updates, and performance enhancements, along with WSO2 Support for 24×7 support. Unified pricing means customers can simply buy a WSO2 Subscription and choose the hosting model—cloud, on-premises or hybrid—based on their preferences. Information on WSO2 Subscription and other service and support offerings can be found at https://wso2.com/consultant-services.

1 Gartner, Essential Skills for Modern Integration Architecture, by Matt Brasier, April 29, 2019