What happened at WSO2Con USA ’18 day 1?

This week the WSO2 Conference is happening in San Francisco and of course Yenlo is there. We were planning to write a blog article after the conference but there is happening so much that we couldn’t wait to share it with our dear followers directly. So, here’s a recap of day 1.

Integration is sexy

Erik Assink, Managing Director Yenlo North America

Tyler Jewell, CEO of WSO2, kicked off WSO2 Con with a very interesting keynote. He explored the evolution of the integration market and how integration technologies have underpinned digital transformation. As the world becomes digitally-native, the role of enterprise architecture is shifting, and we should leverage cloud native and agility initiatives.

His literal words are : ‘Integration is hot again, and the integration market, is now estimated to be $34B in size. According to Gartner: ‘Through 2020, integration will account for 50% of the time and cost of building a digital platform’.

What is happening? Consumer demand is driving an evolution from monolithic systems towards, internet, mobile, and now digital native applications. With less ‘legacy’ and more modern technology like APIs, application suppliers dis-aggregate architecture more towards micro-services level. This is one of the key drivers for an exponential growth of the integration end-points and integration needs. There are many examples that specifically drive integration, and to name an example: Machine Learning can only function when relevant information is available from various sources, and it requires integration to pull relevant data from various sources. As machine learning is emerging more prominently, integration needs are growing as well (of along).

New needs, new roadmap

Where is WSO2 going to support all this? First of all, they make the commitment to provide 10-year long term support for any release. Next, they are committed to a cloud Native Programming Language called Ballerina. Is there a bigger mission? The answer is yes, and it has to do with Agility! WSO2 discovered that over the years the average project duration went from 7 months in 2010, to 2.2 months in 2014, and 1.7 months in 2018, based on customer projects. It seems a plateau (a barrier) is reached to further improve agility. What is the reason for this plateau? Today, the maturity for agility is still in the early stages. ‘People’, ‘process’ and ‘technology’ together define how agile the application development and integration are. In many cases, this is can be typified as monolithic, or API driven at best. 

WSO2 is providing a complete offering for Integration Agile, consisting of a Maturity Model for Agility, Methodology for Agility, and an Architecture for Agility! It is centered around the already available core WSO2 offerings. Once companies become truly agile (Integration Agile), they may even achieve daily releases, in stead of the less frequent current updates. The model also includes prescriptive guidance, for develop, re-use, run, and manage.

Over the next few days, stay tuned for the roadmap on:

• 2018, Q2 release – al geared to microservices
• Ballerina, by end of year v1.0
• WSO2 server less Solution

Introducing MicroESB and API Microgateway

Vinay Babu Yella, Integration Consultant Yenlo

Tyler Jewell announced the launch of MicroESB and API Microgateway for hosting and managing Microservices in his keynote. These are among the most exiting developments of WSO2.

MicroESB

The MicroESB, referred as Micro Integrator, is a lightweight mediation runtime that includes all core mediation capabilities. This is a new run time designed to be container-friendly, whose main purpose is to host a Microservice(s). It’s provided as a profile of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator version 6.3.0 with reduced distribution size. MicroESB is based on the same features as the Integration profile and offers a significantly faster startup time, making it ideal for containers. In addition, it supports Eclipse Oxygen, the latest version of the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE).

We cannot describe all the features of the MicroESB but will do so in an upcoming blogpost giving you more insight into this new product from WSO2.

What we do like to share is a short overview of MicroESB vs ESB Profile:

You see that there are differences from performance perspective as well as functional. In some cases you will use one, in some cases the other.

So, if you have an ESB service (or logically related services) that need to be hosted as a dedicated microservice, you can use MicroESB. You can get all benefits of microservice architecture with this deployment pattern.

See here for more details on configuring this product.

API Microgateway

An API Gateway is the runtime component of the API ecosystem, which is used to enforce API governance policies. You could use API Microgateway in Microservices architecture as a dedicated API gateway per microservice. We have had a short hands-on with this product already and a blog about this will be published soon.

If you want to see what’s in the API Microgateway right now, see here more details on configuring this product.

How to build an Agile Enterprise

Erik Assink – Managing Director Yenlo North America & 
Vinay Babu Yella – Integration Consultant Yenlo

Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2, is one of the drivers behind web-services and SOA. 

Agility made its way into the development and projects of most enterprises. However, this project level agility has not created enterprise agility. In fact, there is a significant concern that microservices and serverless architectures are storing up technical debt for the future.

Paul Fremantle, explained in his talk “How to build an Agile Enterprise” that agility comes with shifting from CoE’s (Center of Excellence) to Compose-able Enterprises, creating right abstraction layers (APIs, events, streams) and Radical simplification of middleware (using Ballerina like programming languages).

In this keynote Paul made very interesting parallels between biology and IT and explained how WSO2 took the learnings from the field of modern biology and applied it to address the key concerns we have today to achieve agility at an enterprise level. He discussed the interaction between enterprise agility and integration agility. Then he explored the architecture and methodology required for enterprise agility and outline a roadmap to increase agility at the enterprise level.

Paul explained how Cell-based architecture for Enterprise IT (with each cell providing different forms of scalability, governance, and agility) is a new notion for your journey of continuous Agility at Enterprise level. He discussed the interaction between enterprise agility and integration agility. Then he explored the architecture and methodology required for enterprise agility and outline a roadmap to increase agility at the enterprise level.

Why do we need Agility?

Why do we need Agility? The key is really to achieve Adaption. In software terms: to meet demand of requirements quickly and efficiently. In an equation:

• Agility + Selection = Adaptation

So, we need fast iterations to drive fast selection, and we can get to better adaptation. To achieve this, disaggregation is required. As a result, programmable endpoints are on the rise.

Why disaggregate?

Because it provides:

• Adapting to functional requirements = Agility
• Adaptation to demand = Scale
• Adaptation to cost = Efficiency

We are now running into a new bottleneck, the process of integration itself! Why?

• The wrong organization
• Fast Waterfall “Wagile” – but not Agile
• Complex processes to get things done
• The wrong technology stack (highly layered, will interrupt)
• Governance

The integration Agility gap is key here. The shift to a composable enterprise, requires dimension of organization.

The WSO2 carbon layer was to simplify and become more componentized. Now the long-term vision of Ballerina to enable to become cloud native (the lowest level of disaggregation). This means:

• Middleware is disappearing
• APIs (can be queried or activated), Events (Triggers), Streams (pattern matching and analysis)

With the growth of micro-services, we need governance, and governance itself inhibits agility. So, the key is that governance needs to be automated, in a way that it is quick, and part of the flow.

Automated Governance (re)-enables the Agile flow, and requires the following:

• Source of truth – policy story (what is the desired state)
• Enforcement of the policy (keep it the desired state – like API Gateway)
• Observability (how close to the desired state are we – like API Analytics) 

Ready for day 2?!

This is just a small recap from a few keynotes of day one. We’re looking forward to day two, where more presentations about Microservices, API Gateways and agile architecture are on the agenda. Keep an eye on our twitter account @YenloTeam where we share live updates or read our next blog update about day 2 tomorrow. Subscribe on this page if you want to receive the blog instantly in your mailbox.

Can’t wait? In the meantime, you might can read our API Gateway Selection guide.

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