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Common B2B SaaS Integration Patterns and When to Use Them

According to a recent survey, the number of SaaS companies has grown to more than 25,000 worldwide. In general, businesses that subscribe to SaaS products work with multiple SaaS vendors and expect that the apps will integrate with each other. To address this, some SaaS companies build bespoke integrations into their apps, while others go with an embedded integration platform to address their customers' integration needs.

Regardless of the approach you are taking for integrations with your app, you'll find that most integrations should fit into a few common patterns. Knowing these patterns will help whether you find yourself in the midst of an integration project, just getting started with building out your API, or in the early days of planning a new SaaS app.

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Evaluating Webhooks vs. Polling

Yet another key to building an effective integration is implementing eventing. 

For example, do you want the workflow to fire when the user manually clicks a ‘sync’ button, automatically when some other action is completed, on a timer (i.e. nightly), or automatically in the background?

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The Flavors of APIs

Flavors of APIs

In today’s tech landscape, APIs are a hot topic. The rise of microservice-based architectures as opposed to legacy monoliths has further driven the necessity of robust APIs. With microservices, powerful applications are broken up – i.e. distributed as discrete components across numerous logical and physical machines. This is possible in part due to the availability of cloud computing – virtualized access to almost limitless compute and storage resources made available in a pay-as-you-go model, provided by large technology companies operating massive data centers around the globe.

You may also like:  Identifying the Different Types of APIs

These microservices-based architectures are a contrast to the large-scale, tightly coupled applications of the past that were better designed to run on the limited infrastructure available at the time. When applications required more resources, they would need to scale vertically (i.e. adding more memory, CPU, or storage to the machine). The ubiquity of computing resources in the cloud allows modern applications to instead scale horizontally, by distributing the load over many less powerful machines. Further, applications can be designed intelligently – with components running on infrastructure that better meets the unique load. This ultimately leads to bite-sized chunks of the larger application having infrastructure which is uncoupled from the rest.

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Getting Webhooks Behind That Firewall of Yours

In this post, I'll show you how to receive webhooks in real time from GitHub.com, even if your CloudBees Core stuff is behind a firewall. You can generalize this to other services too — such as BitBucket or DockerHub, or anything really that emits webhooks, but the instructions will be for GitHub projects hosted on github.com. The benefit, of course, is that you can use these public hosted services if you like, but your Core instances do not necessarily have to be directly open to the internet.

What Are Webhooks?

Just a very quick refresher on what webhooks are: Messages (often JSON, but not always) typically posted by HTTP(S) from a server to a client that is listening for events.

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How to Deploy React Apps Using Webhooks and Integrate Slack on Ubuntu

React is a JS library that is used to build user interfaces. It is mostly used in making single-page and mobile applications.

Webhook is a very friendly and helpful way to get notified when something happens. In a web application, when something happens or an event occurs a message is posted via URL. Sometimes, you only need data when something happens, otherwise, you don't require any data. In conventional ways, a web application keeps fetching data from the database rather than waiting for any event that overwhelms the server by compromising more resources. Webhooks gives relaxation to the server and notifies when some event happens.

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Webhooks In Our API Design Toolbox

Another tool in our API Design Toolbox...

We talk a lot about how webhooks are the 101 of event-driven infrastructure. Webhooks are where API providers begin when it comes to developing an awareness of the most important events that are occurring across their platforms. It is how they begin putting event-driven infrastructure to work to help reduce polling on their API infrastructure. As part of our regular work to map out the event-driven landscape, we've organized a handful of the most common webhook building blocks we've come across.