Dell Boomi Dives Into DevOps

Boomi, a Dell Technologies business, today announced it has extended its integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) platform to include application programming interface (API) lifecycle management capabilities.

Announced at the Boomi World 2019 conference, the API lifecycle management tools are an extension of a larger initiative to bring apply best DevOps practices to the building of APIs deployed using the Atom runtime that Boomi relies on to integrate applications and processes.

The three additions being made to the Boomi platform include an API Proxy, a centralized mechanism managing Boomi and third-party APIs; API Gateway, a mechanism for applying governance to APIs; and a self-service API Developer Portal.

In addition, Boomi announced integrations with Pravega, an open source data streaming software project led by Dell EMC, and the publish and subscribe software made available by Solace. Those partnerships extend an Event Driven Architecture that Boomi has defined around its iPaaS environment that includes existing support for Amazon SQS, Microsoft’s Azure Service Bus services and Pivotal RabbitMQ software.

Steve Wood, chief product officer for Boomi, said by partnering with CloudBees to integrate the open source Jenkins continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform and joining the Continuous Delivery Foundation, Boomi is making a concerted effort to meld DevOps and API management to simplify deployment of the Atom runtimes on which the Boomi iPaaS platform depends to integrate applications and services.

In general, Boomi sees a need to embrace DevOps to help customers drive digital business initiatives. To become more agile, Wood said organizations need to be able to deploy Atom runtimes faster.

At the conference, CloudBees CTO Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the founder of Jenkins, told attendees that as they embrace DevOps they should be wary of creating CI islands within their organization. A more holistic approach to DevOps will enable organizations to harness a “gold mine” of metadata using analytics tools that will enable organizations to make more objective decisions about how best to accelerate application development and deployment.

The sharing of best DevOps practices will also be core to Boomiverse, an end user community that Boomi launched this week as part of an effort to increase the number of IT professionals that have Boomi certifications. In the last two years, Boomi has increased the number of certifications being attained from about five a day to now more than 40 as it makes a concerted effort to increase the amount of iPaaS integration expertise available to customers.

It’s not clear to what degree CI/CD platforms and API management ultimately will meld. It’s hard to imagine any organization trying to build and deploy cloud-native applications without having access to both platforms. In fact, most organizations now build, deploy and manage APIs as if they were a standalone application. As such, best DevOps practices are going to be required to manage APIs at scale. The challenge IT organizations now face is finding a way to teach the developers and IT operations teams responsible for building and deploying those APIs how best to work together collaboratively.