Choreo is Now Generally Available

WSO2 is excited to announce that Choreo, a digital platform as a service, is now generally available.

For companies who need a fast, simple, and secure way to create services, integrations, and APIs, Choreo goes beyond traditional integration platform as a service (iPaaS) offerings, API management solutions, or service meshes. It enables developers and operations to go from ideation to production in hours or days versus weeks or months by giving them one seamless, combined experience that abstracts away the complexity of cloud native computing.

Rethinking the Digital Platform

Building new digital platforms for rapid software development is hard. A study by McKinsey found that 70% of complex, large-scale digital transformation programs fail to reach their stated goals.

Part of the challenge involves the complexity of the underlying digital platforms. From our experience working with hundreds of customers, 60% of digital transformation budgets are dedicated to building internal platforms, and they take upwards of 3 years with 100+ team members to complete.

In other words, the vast majority of companies spend too much time and money building and managing their digital platforms, which means less time and money for new digital features they need. Across the thousands of deployments we’ve seen over the past decade, we kept hearing three big challenges:

• It takes too long to innovate and deliver new digital services
• The infrastructure and tooling required for a digital platform is too complex and requires expertise that is in short supply
• Processes for governance and security add a lot of delays and costs, in part because they are so manual.

The core technologies behind most digital platforms evolved from initiatives done by some of the most advanced tech companies, like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (aka the FAANG companies). These companies have both the talent and the financial resources to manage the most complex environments at the greatest scale, and build the automation needed to be agile. It is part of their competitive advantage to this day.

But the vast majority of companies need technology that is less complex and that supports both their existing developer and operations skillsets, as well as their existing systems. They want a digital platform and tooling that lets them focus on what matters most, like the business logic, and that makes their DevOps simple and fast.

Introducing Choreo, the First Digital PaaS 

This is why we built Choreo, a digital platform as a service to help companies create and deliver new digital services, integrations, and APIs in hours or days, not weeks or months.

Innovate in Hours or Days

When it comes to digital transformation, speed is everything. But for many companies, it takes weeks or months to deliver new capabilities. 

With Choreo, you can create services, integrations, and APIs by either composing them with graphical diagrams or coding, or both. It’s powered by Ballerina, an open source programming language that makes it easy to create, consume, and compose network services. Make changes in a diagram or in code, and changes automatically show up in the other. 

Developers can get started by composing graphically and then directly edit the created code, combining the productivity of low code with the power and flexibility of full code. 

When coding, Choreo includes AI-based features like smart code completion and data mapping that help improve productivity. Choreo also estimates performance times, which helps developers assess whether their composite services are going to deliver on SLAs before going into production.

In addition, Choreo helps increase reuse. Developers can discover, add, compose, and share components using a built-in developer marketplace without having to code. You can share any services, integrations, or APIs. There are already pre-built connectors that provide easy access to over 400 APIs, and more are constantly being added.

Throughout the beta program, and across the early adopters, teams have been able to create and deliver new APIs, services, and integrations in hours from development to production.

Simplify Cloud Native Infrastructure, and DevOps

Part of the reason for being able to deliver much faster is that Choreo abstracts away the complexity of cloud native infrastructure during development and operations. We basically took our learning and best practices from thousands of deployments of the past decade and productized it. We worked hard to redesign the infrastructure and processes from the DevOps down to automate as much as possible and let developers and administrators work as quickly as possible while still ensuring security and governance.

Choreo lets you just write code. Once you want to test or deploy, it walks you through a streamlined process and does most of the underlying infrastructure work for you, from creating the containers and configuration files to managing secrets, tokens, and other details. It has an automated multi-stage CI/CD pipeline for development, testing, staging, and production. In production, it provides the autoscaling, high availability, and disaster recovery needed for business-critical applications and APIs.

Once deployed, everything runs as cloud native apps and APIs on open-source Kubernetes, Docker, and Envoy. But all you have to do is point and click. Choreo does the rest.

Choreo includes built-in testing, where at any time during development you can test with a few clicks without having to deploy or cobble together your own testing frameworks using other platforms. Choreo does let you add third-party tools like Postman as well. 

Choreo also provides built-in deep observability across development and operations. You can see what developers are doing, and also drill down in operations from the code to the machines it runs on, with all observability data and logs brought together in a single console as end-to-end flame graphs and other information—everything you need to find and fix issues as they happen.

Built-in Security and Governance

Behind the scenes, Choreo has built in all the security and governance features and checkpoints into DevOps so you don’t have to bolt on security or governance processes separately that end up slowing you down. 

For example, API lifecycle management is part of the process. Whether you are developing a single API, service, or integration or grouping them together as a project, you can easily manage the lifecycle from creation and publication to deprecation and retirement, along with the people involved. So is identity and access management (IAM), which is built on Asgardeo, WSO2’s cloud native and industry-leading identity as a service (IDaaS) solution.

What the Market is Saying

Well over 10,000 developers signed up for the beta program, and Choreo has gained recognition from beta users and industry influencers, alike. Here’s what some of them had to say.

“A modern digital PaaS should blur the lines between app dev, integration, and security, and democratize participation in delivering digital experiences without excessive technical overhead. WSO2’s Choreo offers a platform for both developers and business experts to get their arms around the complexity of building and deploying API-driven cloud native applications.” — Jason English, Principal Analyst, Intellyx

“Choreo allows you to develop APIs with a great user experience that's focused on the developer like never before. You are fully productive from start to finish. Choreo has knocked down the time-to-market.” — Fidel Prieto Estrada, Integration Consultant and Project Manager, Inetum

Get Started

Are you ready to get started? Just head over to https://wso2.com/choreo/ and sign up for free.

Want to learn more? Please see our Choreo documentation, including our Quick Start Guide.

And if you want to request a demo, we’d be happy to show you one. Just get in touch.