PSD2: threat or opportunity?
By Rob Blaauboer, Integration consultant & Trainer
The keynote speech of the second day was all about the PSD directive in banking. PSD is the Payment Services Directive 2, and requires banks to securely expose customer account and payment data with third parties through APIs. On stage was Seshika Fernando, Head of Financial Solutions of WSO2, who talked about PSD2, and how the imminent directive for the EU states might change the worldwide banking sector.
The PSD2 turns banks into a commodity, as it puts the era of exclusivity to an end. This is great news to customers, but poses a threat to banks. New entrants might just take their customers, which causes problems and maybe even bankruptcy. According to WSO2, consolidated customer financials are the way to stop this. This way, banks can get a good overview of a client’s situation on a third-party level. This is not an unthinkable move, as research shows that 67% of British people want banks to be the Trusted Third Party (TTP). Banks still need to step up their game, though. They really need to become a bigger part of their customers’ lives, which is not that simple.
Seshika suggests banks take care of the following:
- Vision regulation versus business opportunity
- People concern for compliance and IT versus all departments
- Culture: take nothing for granted, keep innovating
- Technology
When it comes to technology, Seshika mentions:
- API Management
- Integration
- Identity and Access managed
- Smart analytics
WSO2 has created WSO2 Open Banking, a solution that shows a setup of the four components to give people an idea of what banks can do. This way, they can keep on playing the role they have had for so many years: being a guardian of customer’s data, while enjoying all the benefits that come with it. When it comes to security, Seshika says that safety and transparency are key, meaning that open standards OAUTH2 and OpenID Connect are prime candidates, because they are open and non-proprietary.
Getting your hands dirty during the Birds-of-a-Feather session
By Jochen Traunecker, Director Yenlo LABS
Today, two hours were dedicated to an in-depth insight into the Ballerina language. During the Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) Session, we could get our hands dirty with Ballerina guided by a Ballerina core developer team. Getting started was easy:
- Download latest greatest Ballerina runtime and tooling [1]
- Unzip it and fire up Ballerina Composer
- Walk yourself through the growing set of examples [2]
The world’s most famous standard example web service “echo” was implemented within minutes – even with basic error handling:
import ballerina.net.http;
service<http> mysample {
@http:resourceConfig {
methods:[“POST”],
path:”/echo”,
consumes:[“application/json”]}
resource params (http:Request req, http:Response res) {
json jsonMsg;
try {
jsonMsg = req.getJsonPayload();
} catch (error err){
jsonMsg = {feedback:”Something went wrong”, error:err.msg};
}
res.setJsonPayload(jsonMsg);
res.send();
}
}
The Ballerina sessions were closed with a brief introduction on the internals of Ballerina and its relationship to the Java eco system. This can get summarized as follows: Ballerina language by itself has no ties to the Java language at all. It gets compiled to Ballerina Byte Code and gets executed by the Ballerina Virtual Machine (a register machine, not a stack machine).
At this point in time, the Ballerina compiler and Ballerina Virtual Machine are implemented in Java and Ballerina Virtual Machine executes on-top of the Java Virtual Machine utilizing Java core libraries and a limited set of third party libraries like Netty [3]. When you take this into account, Ballerina can be considered a future-proof concept under a very community friendly open-source license [4]. It’s just a matter of effort to provide an alternative Ballerina Virtual Machine implemented, for example in Go language.
[1] https://ballerinalang.org/downloads/ [2] https://ballerinalang.org/docs/by-example/ [3] https://netty.io/ [4] http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0WSO2 Stream Processor
By Nils Eckert, Integration Specialist
Today, WSO2 hosted various hands-on sessions to get into detail on what had been presented on day 1. WSO2 Stream Processor was no exception. During one of these sessions, WSO2 explained the reason behind removing Spark – basically because 80-90% of what has been done through Spark scripts can now be done through the Siddhi App. The presenters used examples to explain the concepts in more detail, and to demonstrate the capabilities of the WSO2 Stream Processor.
Beside the removal of Spark scripts and the introduction of the so-called Siddhi App as the main artefact – a Siddhi App is basically an enhanced version of an execution plan with additional annotations for receivers, publishers and more –, there are more changes compared to the Data Analytics Server. First, WSO2 Stream Processor comes with four different profiles:
– Editor/Studio (a development environment)
– Worker (a resource node)
– Dashboard
* Portal (business dashboard)
* Business Rules Manager (management console for business users)
* Status Dashboard (monitoring dashboard)
– Manager (the job manager for distributed processing)
Second, product configuration is no longer done through a bunch of XML or JSON files. Instead, there is a single YAML for each profile with all the configuration parameters, like port offset, data sources, and so on.
The WSO2 Stream Processor is currently available as an alpha version and can be downloaded here. The documentation for WSO2 Stream Processor is still work in progress, and although some parts obviously refer to the WSO2 Data Analytics Server, there is quite some useful information available. The documentation can be found here: https://docs.wso2.com/display/SP400/Using+the+Stream+Processor+Studio.
The FOITT success story: precise like a Swiss army knife
By Patrick Toenz, Managing Director Yenlo Switzerland
Today, Gion Sialm presented his WSO2 success story. Gion is Chief Architect at the Swiss FOITT (Federal Office of IT & Telecoms). As can be expected of a Swiss Chief Architect, he brought chocolate for the entire audience – and then went straight to the hard numbers. And he had every right: the management of three different infrastructure setups over twelve stages and six network zones for many WSO2 modules takes some time to explain.
Add to this the frequent base software (WSO2) releases and many applications and services, and you will be amazed by the amount of work that had to be done by the platform engineers of FOITT. And if you looked at all the deployment and testing work, you cannot but conclude that the project would end up with quite a few discrepancies and errors.
Not so with proper architecture and planning – which is Gion’s Mantra. He demonstrated how he overcame all the obstacles by having a central configuration repository with a clearly defined syntax and by automating all deployment and configuration. Today, a simple press on the button does all the magic and synchronizes installation and configuration across dozens of servers – precise like a Swiss army knife.
Even more interest was raised by Gion’s Monitoring Dashboard (based on WSO2 DAS), showing the status of the message flows on the FOITT WSO2 infrastructure.
Anecdote: at the end of the presentation, Gion pulled our colleague Nils Eckert on stage, who had supported and understood Gion’s vision from the very beginning and implemented it with alongside of him. Nice gesture, Gion – and many thanks for the nice presentation!
WSO2 is like a good wine
We closed the day with a panel discussion with five partners of WSO2, about the importance of partnership case studies. Our colleague Rob Blaauboer took part in the discussion, and stated that WSO2 is like an iceberg, meaning there is much more under the water than many people know. This is because it’s quite hard to learn WSO2: you don’t learn it at school and you don’t master it after only a few weeks of training. Rob said: “WSO2 is like a good wine. It gets better with time and experience”.
Speaking of wine: the second day is almost a wrap, but not before we’ve attended the conference party! See you tomorrow on the third and last day!
