2019 Product Releases—Moving Towards Being Truly Cloud Native!

The API-driven world continues to evolve around us. Integration is increasingly moving to the cloud, away from monolithic architectures, amid an ever-increasing need for hybrid- and multi-cloud deployments. This, in turn, requires integration technologies to become cloud native, be lightweight with faster boot-up times, and easily integrate with decentralized microservices environments. The need to build applications faster and have more control over them has also brought on a change in the developer mindset—one that focuses on code-driven integration rather than the traditional config-driven approach. 

Our latest releases address these needs head-on to arrive as the articulation of what WSO2 stands for today, delivering products that are on the path to becoming truly cloud native. Congratulations to the WSO2 team and our open-source contributors who participated in our efforts to introduce these major updates! 

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.0 now enables developers to use either a code-driven or graphical configuration-driven approach for integrating microservices or centralized ESB architectures. It includes three key components to address the needs of a wider audience that prefer different approaches.

• Code-driven integration — Ballerina Integrator provides a powerful, simple-to-learn, code-driven approach to programming integrations based on the Ballerina programming language.
• Low-code integration — Micro Integrator is an intuitive, graphical, drag-and-drop, and configuration-driven integrator based on the cloud-native variant of the battle-tested WSO2 EI/ESB runtime. It is lightweight, container-native, and supports distributed deployments.
• Streaming integration — Streaming Integrator is a cloud-native, lightweight component that understands streaming SQL queries to capture, analyze, process, and act on events in real-time.

You can read more about the latest Enterprise Integrator release in this blog from Peter Evans, Evangelist, Associate Director - CTO Office. 

We also released WSO2 API Manager 3.0, the only fully open-source platform for creating, managing, consuming, and monitoring APIs and API products. The solution now includes significant functionality to monetize API products, maximize adoption, and reuse across internal and external portals and API marketplaces. WSO2 API Manager was updated with the aim of optimizing the productivity of software developers, API publishers, and API consumers. This post from Nuwan Dias, Product Manager for WSO2 API Manager, provides more details about the latest release.

In December, WSO2 API Manager was named a market champion, technology leader, and overall leader in the KuppingerCole API Management and Security Leadership Compass. The report examines security for the entire API lifecycle and gives recognition for WSO2 based on demonstrating leadership across three areas: product, innovation, and market. It also cited WSO2 API Manager’s open-source code base, flexibility, and ability to integrate with WSO2 Identity Server to extend support for identity federation protocols and authentication. Founded in 2004, KuppingerCole Analysts is an international and independent analyst organization headquartered in Europe.

WSO2 Identity Server 5.9 now enables IT organizations to deliver enhanced user experiences, and increase adoption. The latest release adds features such as support for RESTful APIs, new adaptive authentication options, cross-protocol single logout, multi-domain federation support for Microsoft Azure AD and Office 365, and built-in support for managing active user sessions. To learn what else is new about the product, read this post from Ashen Weerathunga, Senior Software Engineer. Also, this blog by Ishara Naotunna, Product Marketing Manager for WSO2 Identity Server, shares recent success stories while celebrating the product’s twelfth anniversary.

This year, WSO2 Identity Server was named an overall leader, as well as a market leader, innovation leader, and product leader, in Kuppingercole’s Leadership Compass: Identity API Platforms. Recognizing the need for identity APIs, the report presents market research on various identity API platforms to measure their capabilities, market presence, and innovativeness. 

We reached a significant milestone for Ballerina this year with its 1.0 release. Ballerina is the first language based on the concept that modern application programming involves creating and consuming APIs. It is architected to serve as the core of a language-centric platform for cloud-native applications and microservices. It has all the general-purpose functionality expected of a modern programming language and also introduces several unusual aspects that make it particularly suitable for its purpose. These include:

• Language constructs specifically for consuming and providing network services.
• Abstractions and syntax for concurrency and network interaction that closely correspond with sequence diagrams—enabling a bidirectional mapping for any Ballerina source code between its textual representation and its graphical representation as a sequence diagram.
• A structural type system that is more flexible and allows for looser coupling than traditional statically typed languages—particularly useful when combining data from multiple, independently-designed systems.

During 2019, WSO2 Open Banking, our purpose-built solution that enables banks to achieve full compliance in open banking, expanded its reach from the EU and UK to Australia, Singapore, Mexico, and the Gulf. The solution now provides inbuilt support for well-established specifications such as Open Banking UK, Berlin NextGenPSD2, and the Australian Consumer data standards. WSO2 Open Banking also has received OpenID FAPI certification, which is a stamp of recognition for its compliance with industry standards and best practices. The latest release enables banks to comply with the Australian Consumer Data Standards Specification v1.0. Read this blog by Sachini Siriwardene, Software Engineer, for more information about the latest release. 

Siddhi, which is part of our community-driven open-source projects, is a cloud-native, scalable, micro streaming, and complex event processing system. In 2019, it was listed on the CNCF Landscape and had four releases. Now, it can natively perform event processing on Kubernetes and has enhanced integration capabilities via NATS, gRPC, Protobuf, MongoDB, CDC, S3, and Kafka. 

Our products, along with our open-source model, embrace the future for digital businesses that rely on hybrid integration and are increasingly moving to the cloud. Our future releases will continue this journey and empower developers to deliver their apps and services with even greater agility, reliability, and performance. 

To learn more about working with us, visit our website here.