Informatica Redesigns iPaaS for Microservices Age
Microservices enabled by containers are about to radically transform how enterprise software is consumed, and one of the first examples is a major revision of integrated platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environments developed by Informatica.
Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, unveiled today, is a redesigned implementation of the company’s iPaaS software that makes it much simpler for IT organizations to only consume specific modular services rather than the entire iPaaS platform, says Ronen Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager, big data, cloud and data integration at Informatica. It can be deployed on-premises or in a public cloud.
Microservices, Schwartz says, are about to change the entire IPaaS experience for most organizations. Each function in the Informatica iPaaS is now delivered using Docker containers that should foster increased consumption of various modules and patterns within the Informatica iPaaS environment, he says.
Schwartz points to a growing number of use cases in which iPaaS functions need to be deployed locally. New compliance regulations such as the General Data Protection Rule (GDPR) put forward by the EU require organizations to store data in specific geographic region. Internet of things (IoT) projects are pushing more processing out the network edge. It’s also now only a matter of time before many existing monolithic applications are deconstructed into a series of microservices, some of which will be deployed locally or in a public cloud depending on what makes the most sense. The result is a more federated approach to data integration spanning both on-premises IT and public cloud services. As such, IT organizations need an approach to iPaaS that provides them the flexibility required to deploy modules wherever they best see fit, says Schwartz.
In general, any successful transition to microservices will be dependent on having an iPaaS environment in place that can integrate all the application programming interfaces (APIs) involved at scale, he says.
Like previous generations of the Informatica iPaaS platform, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services also makes use of the Informatica AI CLAIRE Engine, which employs machine learning algorithms in a way that makes it possible to ingest massive amounts of data into and out of an IT environment, Schwartz says. One of the major challenges any IT organization making the shift to a microservices architecture is the need to be able to provide various microservices with access to data as it becomes available, he notes.
Informatica expects DevOps teams will play a more significant role in specifying which iPaaS environments get employed across the distributed enterprise. Previously, integration platforms were typically specified by senior IT leaders. But as usage patterns change, it’s clear DevOps teams want to flexibility invoke iPaaS services wherever and whenever needed.
It might be several years before enterprise IT organizations make a complete transition to microservices architectures. But the one thing that is already apparent at the beginning of that journey is that the number of moving modules of code that need to be integrated going forward will be several exponential orders higher than ever before.
