Introduction to Apigee Integration
Apigee Integration is Google’s brand new integration platform which extends the existing Apigee X API Management platform delivering a unified cloud platform for both application integration (iPaaS – Integration Platform as a Service) and API Management.
Apigee Integration, available with a separate license as an ‘add-on’ for Google Apigee, comes with an easy to use integration designer which allows you to create powerful integration scenarios by dragging integration components onto a canvas. It augments the functionality of your integration scenarios with more complex integration patterns like sequential-looping, parallel execution, complex routing, long-running workflows, complex data mapping and event-based triggers.
Connectivity to common SaaS services like for example Salesforce, Elasticsearch or Google Cloud services like Cloud SQL or Cloud Pub/Sub is facilitated through easy-to-use pre-build connectors. Although the list of connectors today is rather limited, new connectors are regularly added.
In this blog we created a couple of easy to build integration scenarios with Apigee Integration to prove its value.
The Integration Scenario
Our simple integration scenario contains two Apigee Integrations. The first Integration queries new orders created by our customers in Magento, an eCommerce platform and sends these orders to our Salesforce instance. Once the order is created/modified in Salesforce, the order is sent to an Apigee Integration which sends a notification to Microsoft Teams and a mail to a distribution list.
High level diagram of the integration scenario
Diagrams of Integrations
Connectivity to Magento
For this integration we decided to make use of a scheduled trigger to initiate the polling of Magento. Each polling cycle consists of a call to a Magento API to retrieve all the changes in the business data we are interested in. As of today, there is no dedicated connector for Magento so we use the standard ‘call REST Endpoint’ task.
Connectivity to Salesforce
The Apigee integrations product provides 2 objects that can help you connect to Salesforce:
- Connector: this is an adapter for all outgoing calls towards Salesforce. For more information on Apigee connectors see https://cloud.google.com/apigee/docs/api-platform/connectors/about-connectors
- Salesforce trigger: as the name implies, this object is used for receiving a trigger when updates are done to specified object in Salesforce. In our project the triggers use the Change Data Capture functionality of Salesforce. More info on Salesforce triggers can be found here: https://cloud.google.com/apigee/docs/api-platform/integration/configuring-salesforce-cdc-trigger
Mapping
Transforming incoming data from the Salesforce trigger can be done with the Data Mapping task. Apigee Integration contains a graphical ‘Data Mapping Editor’ that lets you map data structures and perform simple transformations on them. You can even use a function library to create more complex data transformations.
Conclusion
Apigee Integration proves its value as a powerful cloud based integration platform (iPaaS) especially combined with Apigee X API Management. We definitely liked the easiness in which even complex integration scenarios can be created by simple drag and drop integration tasks to a canvas! We also liked the rather low entry level allowing even technically skilled business people to create already very useful integrations.
Currently the amount of built-in connectors is rather low but Google is doing a tremendous effort to expand the amount of these built-in connectors. The configuration of those connectors is again, straight-forward.
Apigee Integration in combination with the proven Apigee X API Management platform is very promising to deliver API first integration scenarios on an enterprise scale level.