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Choreo Is neither aPaaS, nor iPaaS

Background

WSO2 has been building enterprise software since 2005 and the team has been working with 1000s of enterprise customers ever since. WSO2’s products cover a range of capabilities from API Management (APIM), Integration, Stream Processing, and Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM). All these product capabilities are available to the users as installable software (binaries) that can be installed on customers' choice of infrastructures such as physical servers, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure. In addition to these installable versions, WSO2 has offered these functionalities as a cloud (SaaS) solution via WSO2 Cloud. This SaaS offering was a scalable installation of WSO2 products on a shared cloud infrastructure which did not provide many capabilities beyond the installable components’ functionality.

WSO2 team has identified this as a limitation of the platform given the fact that most enterprises are moving towards cloud and cloud-native solutions. After several years of RnD efforts, the WSO2 team is thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of Choreo on 30th March 2022. The official announcement can be found here.

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Designing Microservices Platforms With NATS [Book] Released!

Just Released!

It is a great and humble feeling to release my very first book “Designing Microservices Platforms with NATS” on 19th November 2021 (first edition). You can read it through Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, Packt, and other distributors worldwide.

Cover of the book Designing Microservices Platforms with NATS

Why Another Microservices Book?

I hear you! Why there are so many books about microservices? Is that so complicated? Why do people use it? Those were some of the questions I had when reading about microservices in the wild (internet). The more I read through, the more I realized that there is something missing. That missing piece was the first principle and the simplicity when building microservices.

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SOA Governance to API Management — A Pragmatic Approach

Introduction

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one of the foundational architecture styles that engineers used within enterprise software systems in the past and there are still a considerable amount of enterprises using it. As we all know, technology is an ever-evolving field like most of the other fields. Some people say that Microservices Architecture (MSA) is “SOA done right”. In my personal view, that statement is partially true. MSA has a way more to figure out in terms of management and governance of microservices.

SOA governance was a complicated process and many enterprises have failed to apply that within their SOA projects. It required the entire IT teams to change the way they have been doing things pre-SOA era and in most cases, people were reluctant to accept those changes. All in all, the failure of the adoption of SOA governance was not entirely because it was not good for the enterprises, but it was complicated to implement and the IT generation of that time was not entirely ready for that level of governance and control.

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Three Programming Languages That Will Drive Enterprise Development

Which language will take the throne in 2019?

I used to be a part of a team that developed a modern programming language targeting enterprise software. After spending two years designing, implementing, and using that programming language, I’ve moved into a different role where I became a user of many technologies, including the so-called programming language and many other modern programming languages.

“Ballerina,” a programming language designed for implementing modern, network-aware, cloud-native applications has released the GA 1.0 as of September 10th. It is a great achievement by a team of passionate individuals who spent days and nights to make this a reality. As I mentioned before, I have started using different technologies as part of my new role as a solutions architect (who build things in addition to do presentations).

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Architecting a Modern Digital Platform With Open-Source Software

The digital business landscape is helping businesses to grow beyond geographical boundaries. Transforming your business into a digital business is no longer an optional thing, rather it has become a necessity. Early adopters, late boomers, methodical players, every enterprise is trying to modernize its enterprise IT ecosystem to improve the efficiency and become a leader in their respective enterprise domain. If you are an enterprise architect who is responsible for building a digital platform from scratch, modernize an existing IT platform or lift and shift an existing deployment into the cloud, there are hundreds of different software and technology vendors available to support your effort. The days of proprietary software is long gone and people are more and more migrating towards open-source software (OSS). One of the major challenges of adopting OSS is the maintenance overhead. But that challenge is absorbed by the mega-cloud vendors as well as other cloud services offered by the vendors who created these OSS IP.

In this post, I'm going to discuss building a modern digital platform with OSS. Most of the software components I'm using here are free to download and play around. If you really need to build a production-grade system, it is recommended to get commercial support from the respective vendors. The other important aspect of this architecture is that it is vendor-neutral. You can replace any vendor with OSS or proprietary software without impacting the overall architecture. The components are loosely coupled and can deploy and run independently.