Why is integrations important for companies?
Integrations ensure data consistency by allowing systems to share and update data in real-time, reducing discrepancies and providing accurate, up-to-date information for decision-making. This leads to better insights, improved decision-making and more effective business strategies. Furthermore, integrations enable greater scalability as businesses grow and evolve, allowing them to add or modify systems and functions without disrupting existing operations. The enhanced customer experience offered through integrations also becomes a significant advantage as it allows for a more personalized and seamless user experience across multiple platforms. Therefore, integrations form the backbone of a company’s digital strategy, driving its success in today’s interconnected business landscape.
What should we look for in an integration platform?
Before you compare different solutions to drive your integrations you should define what’s important for your company. To give you an idea of areas to consider we’ve written a short list:
- Cloud-agnostic – can you afford to use a cloud native solution and be stuck with that cloud vendor?
- Code or No code – do you want the developers to hardcode the integrations in the source code or do you want to change the integrations in a web browser?
- Is it ok to wait for a new release of your software to implement changes in the integrations?
- Run in your own realm or install your api:s on someone else’s it environment?
- Will you manually document the integrations somewhere or should it be supported by the platform automatically?
- What logging of events and integrations do you need? Alerts when something goes wrong?
- Do you need to run scheduled integrations?
- Do you have legacy systems that you need to watch for changes and start integrations when that happens?
- Do you need capacity of millions of requests per second? Or is thousands enough?
Copyl Integration Platform (CIP)
CIP provides a flexible integration platform as a service (IPaaS) based on the OpenAPI (Swagger) specifications of your services. By granting CIP access to the Swagger files, the platform automatically recognizes the various methods, endpoints (referred to as “Actions” in CIP), and data models associated with your APIs.
The defining characteristic of CIP is its event-triggered design. After providing your Swagger files to CIP, you’ll define “triggers” – these are specific events occurring at your API endpoints, like “new invoice created”, “invoice paid”, or “user created”. These triggers serve as the mechanism that prompts CIP to take action.
Once triggers are set, you define the integrations within CIP by selecting a trigger and linking it to the desired Actions (API methods/endpoints) that should be invoked in response. The data resulting from the trigger event is automatically passed to the corresponding Action(s), streamlining the integration process and automating the flow of data.
Some really good arguments for Copyl Integration Platform and Microservice Management:
- All the processes are visualized and available for anyone, at anytime. Plus automatic documentation.
- No code needed to manage integrations, as long as they are reporting events.
- No need to wait for new releases to be deployed
- Your code is only reporting to Copyl – the integrations is an abstraction layer
- Visualization overview of the status of all microservices
Learn more about Copyl Integration Platform.
Azure Event Grid (AEG)
AEG, on the other hand, is Microsoft Azure’s fully-managed intelligent event routing service. It simplifies the development of event-based applications and allows for reactive programming through the use of event subscriptions. AEG is primarily built to manage serverless architectures and event-driven designs in the cloud, but it does require more manual setup and configuration in comparison to CIP.
You can programmatically acheive multi-step integrations, even though it’s complicated. You also have somewhat of a log in Azure Application Insights and can program your own logging.
Unlike CIP, which reads from your Swagger files, AEG requires you to manually define the events, endpoints, and data schemas in your applications. You must also manually configure the connections between these events and the corresponding responses.
Learn more about Azure Event Grid.
EventBridge
EventBridge is a serverless event bus service that ingests data from your own applications, integrated SaaS applications, and AWS services. Like CIP, EventBridge makes it easy to build event-driven architectures.
However, unlike CIP, EventBridge doesn’t read directly from Swagger files. The configuration involves creating and managing event buses, rules, and targets, and this setup may not be as streamlined as with CIP.
EventBridge integrates natively with other AWS services, which could be a benefit if you are heavily invested in the AWS ecosystem. But unlike CIP, it might not offer the same level of simplicity when dealing with events and triggers from custom API endpoints.
Learn more about AWS EventBridge.
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Google Cloud Pub/Sub offers many similar features as CIP, including the ability to create event-driven architectures. Pub/Sub, however, is based on the publish-subscribe pattern rather than reading from Swagger files.
This means that setup in Pub/Sub involves defining publishers that create messages and subscribers that receive them. This can provide more flexibility than CIP in terms of handling the data flow, but it also involves more configuration and a steeper learning curve.
As with EventBridge, Pub/Sub integrates well with other Google Cloud Platform services, but it may not be as straightforward to set up event-driven architectures based on custom API endpoints as with CIP.
Learn more about Google Cloud Pub/Sub.
Summary – as neutral as we can be
In the realm of event-driven integration platforms, Copyl Integration Platform (CIP), Azure Event Grid (AEG), AWS EventBridge, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub each offer unique capabilities.
AEG, as part of Microsoft’s robust cloud ecosystem, provides an intelligent, fully-managed event routing service, but requires more manual configuration.
AWS EventBridge, another serverless event bus service, allows for seamless integration with AWS services, yet doesn’t possess the ability to read directly from Swagger files.
Google Cloud Pub/Sub enables the creation of event-driven architectures based on the publish-subscribe pattern, providing flexibility but with more complex setup.
The standout in this comparison is Copyl, which delivers unprecedented flexibility by leveraging Swagger files to automatically recognize API methods, endpoints, and data models, streamlining the process of defining triggers and actions for event-driven architectures. The support for legacy systems and no-code integrations are unique. These features makes CIP a more accessible and user-friendly solution, potentially saving developers and support substantial time and effort in creating and managing event-driven integrations. And it doesn’t hurt it has the same input capabilities of 5 million requests/second as the largest alternative solution.
