DEVOPSdigest

SnapLogic announced new features and enhancements that boost user productivity and improve platform performance and reliability, helping technical and non-technical development teams realize faster time-to-value from integrations.

Headlining the new features are support for design-first API methodology and versioning that make it easy for technical and non-technical users to quickly create new applications around specific APIs; anomaly detection and memory management capabilities that automatically and proactively identify issues, improving platform resilience; and enhancements to Kubernetes-based elastic scaling capabilities that enable organizations to dynamically scale platform resources to meet spike increases in workload demands.

“Resiliency, productivity, and speed are all critical elements when it comes to enterprise automation success. At the same time, the ‘developer’ role has been expanded to include more employees than ever before, reinforcing the importance of designing tools that are intuitive and easy-to-use for all,” said Craig Stewart, CTO at SnapLogic. “Here at SnapLogic, we are dedicated to continually enhancing the capabilities of our platform to ensure that we address all of our customers’ needs. Being efficient, flexible, performant, and easy-to-use is the only way to truly improve time-to-value from integrations and automations.”

New advanced API management capabilities incorporated in the release add tools and support for API developers who prefer to take a “design-first” approach to API creation. With design-first API creation, the design and specifications of the API are developed before creation of the integration pipeline. SnapLogic simplifies API implementations, guiding technical and non-technical users to select and modify settings and features related to APIs, speeding up development and publication. With SnapLogic, application developers and integration specialists now have the option to choose either top-down or bottom-up development, allowing them to select the method that best suits their needs and that delivers the fastest time-to-value.

In addition, SnapLogic adds API versioning in this release, enabling developers to easily create new API versions and manage the assets and policies of each version independently, without incurring any manual versioning management overhead. Developers can update an API with new policies, or add new functionality, while the endpoint remains the same. SnapLogic then automatically applies the new policies and functionality for the new version. Existing consumers of newly versioned APIs are unaffected during the process.

As part of SnapLogic’s commitment to increasing platform operational capabilities and enhancing the developer experience, this latest release delivers better protections for app and data integrations that require a great deal of platform resources.

With the addition of Pipeline Runtime Anomaly Detection, the platform automatically reviews time-series data to proactively identify pipelines that consume an unusual amount of resources. Based on pre-set thresholds and/or deviations from what is considered normal operations, the SnapLogic platform alerts platform administrators when there might be a problem. By identifying potential issues before they become catastrophic problems, in combination with enhanced memory management capabilities that reduce memory consumption (even for high performance Snaps such as Join and Group-by), platform resiliency is improved.

SnapLogic now offers queue-based dynamic scaling for environments experiencing spikes in workload demand, such as month-end data processing or other seasonal, high-demand activities. Customers with SnapLogic Groundplexes can now leverage an execution node’s queue size as a trigger signal that launches automatic scaling of platform resources, up or down. Customers now have another tool in their arsenal to make Kubernetes scaling decisions, beyond CPU or memory consumption. Scaling SnapLogic Groundplex nodes up or down more precisely as needed for workload demands means infrastructure capacity can be right-sized more efficiently.

The May 2021 release also includes the following new and updated features, helping customers improve application connectivity and user productivity:

- New Snaps and Snap Packs:
* Twilio - A new Snap Pack to interface with the Twilio API, which helps create powerful communication experiences such as sending texts, or initiating phone calls.
* Oracle NetSuite - A new Snap to call NetSuite RESTlets for customer journey workflows such as order-to-cash.
* SAP - SAP RFC Listener Snap has been added to the SAP Snap Pack to enhance real-time response to an event from a non-SAP system.

- ELT Support for Snowflake on GCP - SnapLogic customers can now use ELT functionality to push down transformations to Snowflake instances on the Google Cloud Platform.

- SCD2 Functionality with ELT - SCD2 functionality enables technical and non-technical users to track historical data changes. Customers can now use SCD2 functionality across both standard pipelines and ELT pipelines, ensuring analytical visibility, even if the underlying data changes frequently.