TIBCO

This year I wasn’t able to attend re:Invent, but I did want to do something nice in between the live streams and specifically around Serverless compute and AWS Lambda.

Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume — there is no charge when your code is not running. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service — all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability.

With Project Flogo you can visually create Ultralight Edge Microservices and run them anywhere. But what if you want to run those incredibly light microservices using one of the most powerful container management platforms, Kubernetes?

Prerequisites

As described on the Kubernetes website

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.

If you haven’t set up your own Kubernetes cluster yet, I can absolutely recommend looking at minikube. The team has made an amazing effort to make it super easy to run your own cluster locally with minimal installation effort.

The explosion of SaaS as the typical acquisition pattern for enterprise software means that any given organization has (or will have) dozens of apps to connect to each other. In fact, the average Marketing department uses about 30 different SaaS apps, and the average HR department…

Last month TIBCO added the ability to add custom activities to TIBCO Cloud Integration — Web Integrator (I’ll use Web Integrator going forward). The Web Integrator experience is “Powered by Project Flogo”, so when you create your own extensions for Web Integrator, and use them in every flow that you want, those activities will work with Project Flogo as well. In this blog post I’ll walk through creating a new extension that connects to IFTTT using the WebHooks service.

Back in 2012, the engineering team at Heroku created a set of best practices to develop and run web apps. That document, consisting of 12 incredibly important ‘rules’, was dubbed the 12 Factor App manifesto. Over the years the document gained a lot of traction and especially with the rise of microservices having a 12 Factor App compliant app became important. With the rise of microservices a lot of other practices and tools (like git, DevOps, Docker and Configuration Management) became very popular as well.

Pretty much all the large cloud platforms provide not only a great visual interface to get things done, they also have a great command line interface. As much as I love a great UI when browsing the web, I do tend to favor the command line interfaces when I’m focusing on developing things.

In 2016 TIBCO announced Project Flogo as an ultra lightweight integration engine. It is the lightest way to connect IoT devices being up to 20 to 50 times lighter than Node.js and Java® Dropwizard. Project Flogo was made available as Open Source Software because TIBCO believes there is a better way to integrate IoT devices. With it being Open Source and easily extensible, you want to make sure that the activities you build remain working after each check in on GitHub. These are a lot of words to say “How can I test my activities every time code is pushed to Git”?

Over the past few weeks I’ve gotten many questions on how to use Basic Authentication with the new Web Integrator in TIBCO Cloud Integration. It is really easy to do that!

In the age of large monolithic apps and app servers, it was not too difficult to monitor the status of your application as well as some more detailed monitoring of transactions. In today’s age of microservices, that whole monitoring thing is getting more and more complex. You not only have to deal with a bunch of more servers, you also have to deal with more (micro)services. You have different options depending on what you want to monitor. For example, you can use Nagios, Zabbix or Prometheus. My personal preference goes out to Greek deity that stole fire from Mount Olympus and brought it to us.

In 2002 Jeff Bezos issued a mandate that would change the world forever. At the very least it brought a massive change to how data is reused on the Internet. The mandate from Jeff Bezos was:

• All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

• Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
• There will be no other form of inter-process communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
• It doesn’t matter what technology they use.
• All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
• Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. Thank you; have a nice day!

That mandate started a great deal of what we see as the API economy today. Many of the worlds’ enterprises have APIs available that can deliver data so you can focus on building value, rather than worrying about how to get the data. Having said all that, most APIs that are out there are documented but don’t have a swagger.json that you can import in your code. The Web Integrator in TIBCO Cloud Integration gives you the ability to copy and paste the sample messages that those APIs do have and use that as the base to invoke REST APIs.