A Short Overview of iPaaS  

How many SaaS applications did enterprises use in 2022? Answers range from an average of 110 to an average of 130 – an increase of 18% over the previous year, indicating that app adoption is still in growth mode. While users continue to benefit from the wide variety of available apps, the IT professionals tasked with ensuring that all these systems ‘play nice’ often find that this is a major effort. 

iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) is designed to provide IT professionals with the cross-environment application integration that offers businesses with streamlined workflows. iPaaS enables businesses to integrate applications such as CRMs, ERPs, on-site data sources, and cloud applications across various environments. These environments not only comprise cloud to cloud, but also connect on-premises software and cloud applications. iPaaS implements automated workflows, providing the servers and software tools that are required to  build, test, deploy and manage apps in the cloud, in addition to business security, fraud detection, and auditing and reporting functions.

By design, iPaaS allows for continuous integration and delivery. The architecture is distributed, low-code and multi-tenant, and designed to support new and emerging use cases, such as IoT, Edge, and Blockchain. According to Gartner, “iPaaS has moved to early mainstream adoption globally, reaching 20% to 50% of the global target audience who will use iPaaS offerings to integrate not only applications and data, but also ecosystems, APIs and business processes.” 

iPaaS systems offer:

• Integration of heterogeneous underlying data stores, unifying application and data integration
• An API Gateway for securing APIs, certain vendors also incorporate API management
• A rich set of  pre-built application connectors, data catalog and preparation; many also offer master data management
• Automates workflows with facile API orchestration and API lifecycle management, offering a central location for viewing and managing your network of integrations

Some Issues with iPaaS 

iPaaS offers a number of capabilities, yet it often requires highly-skilled professionals to implement and manage the systems. Performance is capped by backend systems and system load, while availability is dependent on the weakest chain in the backend applications.

This limitation could be addressed by cache solutions. While a cache solution stores recently requested data for a limited time window (TTL – time to live), the Cache Hit Ratio in iPaaS configurations is often inconsistent, reflecting issues with performance and data accuracy. iPaaS generally manages application integration efficiently, but when the number of concurrent requests rises, an iPaaS platform is not always able to cope, and may use throttling or other techniques that degrade performance and availability. In addition, if the required data is not in the cache, the query has to go all the way back into the database, often resulting in much higher latency. 

Learn more about how to boost iPaaS performance 

Maximizing iPaaS Performance, Availability and Scalability with Smart DIH

GigaSpaces Smart DIH is an out-of-the-box, in-memory Digital Integration Hub (DIH). It serves data to iPaaS-based workloads from a real-time, event-driven replica of the data, which protects the SoRs on one hand, and provides the applications users with the experience expected from modern, digital applications. Smart DIH uses an event-driven data architecture that allows continuous online updates from SoRs across sites and geographies. The platform offers advanced data integration using pluggable data connectors and embedded CDCs, and simplifies the introduction of new microservices with multi-protocol data APIs over unified data models.

The Smart DIH platform offers extreme in-memory performance, elasticity and scale, business policy-driven tiered storage, low code microservices creation, and always-on services. Cloud agnostic, it can be deployed in multi cloud configuration, on premises, and in hybrid configurations.  

Smart DIH augments iPaaS systems with:

• Real-time replication of all data into a unified data model
• Hosting, persisting and managing data efficiently and effectively
• Improved development, deployment and maintenance of data services 
• Complex service orchestration, integrating data from multiple SoRs into a unified data model 

Find out about how Boomi and Smart DIH’s joint solution maximizes performance, availability and scalability.

Since the data is available in the Smart DIH, read requests stop there, instead of going all the way to the SoRs. This not only provides extreme low latency and high concurrency response rates, it protects the SoRs from overload during peak external users’ activity as the iPaaS workload does not go all the way to the backend systems. These operations also improve the security posture of the SoRs. 

Smart DIH enables iPaaS systems to perform more complex orchestrations at no significant performance price. Data is always accurate, since Smart DIH always supplies fresh, accurate data from its real-time event-based integration (CDC). It uses its pluggable connector framework, and its out-of-the-box integration with IBM InfoSphere Data Replication (IIDR) that feed into the Kafka stream. This enables event-based push notifications, such as heavy traffic alerts pushed to the user that are based on real-time data. As Smart DIH integrates data from various sources, including batch uploads, into its in-memory persistent data store, it allows efficient REST and SQL based access to data that can be joined into a unified data model.

Smart DIH has other ways to enhance iPaaS environments, such as enabling low code creation of data access microservices, and by deploying data sets to any extent without affecting the applications or the SoRs. The platform offers powerful scalability without affecting performance or service availability, and provides data validation and persistence. Storage tiering automatically assigns data to different categories of storage types based on considerations of cost, performance, availability, and recovery. 

Conclusion

Smart DIH integrates with iPaaS platforms to offer a solution that maximizes performance, availability and scalability, offering the ultimate customer experience. Tangible performance enhancements are achieved through the decoupling and isolation of the iPaaS from the IT systems, and by Smart DIH supplying the iPaaS with real-time replication of all relevant data into a unified data model.