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2020/09/08
 
8 Sep, 2020 | 3 min read

WSO2's Summer 2020 Releases Are Here!

  • Chamin Dias
  • Associate Lead - Marketing - WSO2

Integrated API supply chain management is vital to building effective software solutions for modern businesses. Moreover, cloud-first API integration has become the new norm in API management and integration. Within this context, we now need to address the complexities of integrating different systems, protocols, and APIs. This post discusses how WSO2’s latest API management and integration solutions overcome these challenges.

Introduction

API-driven business models have gained popularity and the API economy has risen rapidly in recent years. However, when adopting an API-driven approach, several technical problems become inevitable. These include supporting multiple communication protocols, integrating with different database engines (vendors), deployment options (on-premise, cloud, hybrid, etc.), security with access control, supporting traditional protocols (e.g., REST and SOAP), and presenting usage statistics for business analytics.

To address all these challenges, feature-rich, robust API management and integration solutions are required. WSO2’s API management and integration platforms are continually being improved so that enterprises can reap the benefits of the latest technologies, while also having the flexibility to customize the solutions as per their exact needs.

Based on the above vision, we have released two major product updates: WSO2 API Manager 3.2 and WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.1.

WSO2 API Manager 3.2

WSO2 API Manager has consistently gained recognition from prestigious industry analysts and has been featured in numerous research reports. Most recently, we were named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: API Management Solutions, Q3 2020. The report evaluated the 15 most significant vendors across 26 criteria.

The product supports all key API management requirements, such as managing the full lifecycle of APIs, API versioning, associating SLAs for APIs, securing APIs, and monetizing APIs.

WSO2 API Manager is an open-source product that supports full-lifecycle API management. The product has built-in support for API design, prototyping, API governance, and API analytics. These capabilities help multiple stakeholders—such as API developers, partners, product managers, and API consumers—to get the maximum benefits from the system. There are a number of extensions available to further enhance these capabilities based on user requirements.

In recent releases, our team introduced many new features that are valuable in modern API-driven applications. The product now supports a wide array of protocols and technologies such as WebSockets, GraphQL, gRPC, and AWS lambda. We have included support for managing APIs in service mesh and container-based deployments using Istio integration and Kubernetes operators. We also provide support for CI/CD-based deployment pipelines, using a dedicated CTL; all of these are in addition to the traditional REST/SOAP-based protocols. The recently introduced React-based improvements (to graphical user interfaces) make it easier for users to navigate and perform the tasks with no hassle. Owing to these powerful capabilities, modern organizations can use our product to manage APIs in any complex production environment while adhering to API management best practices.

Figure 1: An overview of WSO2 API Manager

WSO2 API Manager 3.2 comes with a host of new features and improvements such as support for third-party key managers, a new approval workflow (for commonly used operations), query complexity analysis for GraphQL APIs, Git integration support (for CI/CD use cases), compliance with accessibility standards, and a revamped admin portal user interface. More details about these features and improvements can be found in this article and the official product documentation.

WSO2 API Manager Analytics 3.2

Today, most businesses make decisions using data and analytics and API-driven companies are no exception to this. There is a need for solutions that are capable of recording, organizing, and presenting business analytics of the complete API ecosystem. Ecosystem-based analytics assist different stakeholders to have the necessary views of the same system and make adjustments for maximum performance.

With the new release, WSO2 API Manager Analytics has been enhanced with new features and improvements, such as reinvented dashboards, a new set of dimension selectors, newly engineered business analytics dashboards, interactive charts, and much more. This post provides a detailed explanation of these new enhancements.

WSO2 API Microgateway 3.2

With the adoption of microservices in the API management space, the need for lightweight gateways that can support container-based deployments has increased. Compared to traditional deployments, microservice architecture (MSA) demands low resource consumption. WSO2 API Microgatway acts as a gateway for microservices, with inbuilt capabilities for service enrichment such as authentication, authorization, rate limiting, message transformation, and analytics. This makes WSO2 API Microgatway an ideal solution for MSA-based API management scenarios.

The latest version of WSO2 API Microgateway (version 3.2) supports circuit breaker with timeouts, JWKS compatibility for JWT verification, custom claims mapping (for JWTs), and integration with custom Siddhi policies. You can refer to this post for more information.

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 7.1

When developing complex integration solutions, the need to connect various heterogeneous systems (or protocols) becomes inevitable. The wide range of deployment environments (on-premises, cloud, and container-based) makes this even more difficult. Enterprises now need software solutions that can handle any integration use case for a wide range of protocols (HTTP, AMQP, JMS, Kafka, gRPC), standards (OpenAPI, SOAP), databases, SaaS APIs (Salesforce, S3, SQS), and systems (File, SAP).

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator becomes a lifesaver in the above context. It is an open-source, hybrid integration platform that supports API-centric integration scenarios in monolithic, cloud-based, and microservice-based deployment environments. It comes with a set of tools, such as Integration Studio, to make this process much easier for both users and developers. The product offers a choice of mechanisms for either code-driven or graphical,

drag-and-drop/configuration-driven integration. Moreover, it can address modern integration standards and requirements including file integration, data integration, streaming integration, and API/microservices integration.

Figure 2: An overview of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator mainly consists of three products: Micro Integrator, Streaming Integrator, and Integration Studio.

WSO2 Micro Integrator

In the process of developing a system based on integration, rapid development becomes a crucial part of the process as it can save time and make the whole process much easier.

WSO2 Micro Integrator is designed to address this concern. It is a cloud-native variant of the battle-tested WSO2 EI/ESB runtime based on XML configurations. Moreover, it has a CLI tool, a Kubernetes operator, a monitoring dashboard, and hundreds of connectors that facilitate a wide array of integration scenarios. It offers a powerful configuration-driven approach to integration and can help developers to build integration solutions graphically.

The latest version comes with features and improvements such as a readiness probe (to check health), swagger‌ ‌generation‌ ‌for‌ ‌data‌ ‌services‌, distributed task coordination, revamped integration RabbitMQ, and revamped dashboards. This post explains these features and improvements in more detail.

WSO2 Streaming Integrator

When building integration solutions, it is necessary to address some key factors concerning data and data streams. Transforming data from one format to another, correlating data streams, enriching data received from a specific source by combining it with databases, cleaning data by filtering it, modifying the content, summarizing data, and deriving insights by identifying interesting patterns are some important areas.

WSO2 Streaming Integrator is specifically designed to address those challenges. It is capable of understanding streaming SQL queries (to capture, analyze, and process streaming data) and allows users to integrate and act on event streams in real-time. Some of the newly introduced features and improvements are a streaming ETL task wizard (with dashboards for ETL flows), an extension installer, event replay with error store, and improved support for file streaming.

More details about this product can be found here.

WSO2 Integration Studio

When it comes to building integration solutions, enhancing the developer experience means applications can be implemented effectively in less time. With WSO2 Integration Studio, developers can place the relevant artifacts to the CI/CD flow using an enhanced user interface that is specifically designed for them.

The post provides more details about the new improvements, such as CI/CD with maven multi-module projects, enhancing the connector experience, and the embedded integrator runtime.

Summary

At WSO2, our engineers are always working hard on improving our products to offer more feature-rich, extensible, and robust solutions based on cutting-edge technologies. This post provides an overview of the latest releases for WSO2’s API management and integration products.

To find out more, visit the official product pages for WSO2 API Manager and WSO2 Enterprise Integrator.

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