Boomi Cloud Integration Review/Evaluatuon

1                    Introduction

This document covers the details about Dell Boomi Atomsphere platform for integrations. After working with Dell Boomi Atomsphere platform for evaluation purpose, this document abstracts the features, pros and cons with respect to the requirements of our integrations scenarios.

The documents will cover and provides a comparison of the different aspects of the integration lifecycle and integration day to day functions. The broad classification of the topics is as follows:

1.    Infrastructure, Environments and Administration

2.    Integration Build, Testing and Deployments

3.    Transaction Monitoring and Tracking

4.    Use cases implementation during Evaluation

Dell Boomi AtomSphere is a multi-tenant platform that supports application integration for anything, anytime, anywhere, including:

• Cloud to Cloud
• SaaS to SaaS (software-as-a-service)
• Cloud to On-premise
• On-premise to On-premise
• B2B integration

2                    Getting Started

The Dell Boomi platform at https://platform.boomi.com is the home of the following Dell Boomi applications. There are different applications, which are used or rather management/interaction consoles for different scenarios, are as below:

·         AtomSphere — enables application integration for anything, anytime, anywhere. Integrations and processes are build, deployed and managed in via this console. This can be accessed at : https://platform.boomi.com/AtomSphere.html

·         Master Data Management (MDM) — enables you to keep the data representing the “nouns” of your company’s business clean, accurate and consistent. This can be accessed at : https://platform.boomi.com/mdm.html

·         API Management —  enables you to create, publish and centrally manage APIs on-premises or in the cloud. This can be accessed at https://platform.boomi.com/ApiSpehere.html

·         Boomi Trust— continuously updated source of information about system availability, reliability, and performance. This can be accessed at http://trust.boomi.com

The following are common elements across the platform, These can be accessed at Account Setup under the AtomSphere console:

·         Accounts and users — ability to manage account-level settings and user information on the Setup page.

·         Data security — security measures include certificates, secure data center and data communication, and password encryption.

·         Session security — security measures include the ability to log out of all sessions at once, requiring users to log back in after a password change, and an optional session timeout feature.

3                    Infrastructure, Environments and Administration

3.1                Boomi Cloud Atom

·         Boomi Atom cloud instance can be configured using the Atomsphere console. The setup relies on Environments, a virtual entity, which is configurable as per the requirement.

·         An environment may have one Atom instance running in standalone mode or multiple Atoms running in the Clustered mode for High availability.

3.1.1           Pros

·         Easy and fast setup

·         Requires no additional packages to be installed for initial setup.

·         Management is easier as there are very limited set of configurable items.

3.1.2           Cons

·         Limited features as compared to the On-Premise Atom.

·         Several restrictions are in place due to Public nature of Atom Cloud, also results in degraded performance.

·         Does not supports the integration with application running behind Firewall or On-Premise.

·         Different parameters need to be monitored from different consoles. Some are available in Atomsphere, others in ApiSphere. The Boomi trust is used for Environment and atoms availability and performance metrics etc.

·         No support for the file system access.

3.2                On-Premise Atom

·         Boomi On-premise Atom instance can be installed on Windows or Unix Operating Systems. The Installer file can be downloaded using the Atomsphere console.

·         The setup relies on Environments, a virtual entity, which is configurable as per the requirement.

·         The environment needs to have either only Cloud Atoms or only On-Premise Atoms. Hybrid mode is not supported.

·         An environment may have one Atom instance running in standalone mode or multiple Atoms running in the Clustered mode for High availability.

3.2.1           Pros

·         Lightweight, Easy and fast setup.

·         The On-Premise machine hosting an Atom requires having internet access for its normal operation, as this registers and continuously interacts with Boomi Atomsphere.

·         Requires no additional packages to be installed for initial setup. However addition packages are required when integrating with specific application such as SAP or JMS etc.

·         Management is easier as there are very limited set of configurable items. All the management and configuration is handled via Atomsphere cloud console.

3.2.2           Cons

·         Relies heavily on Atomsphere for the management and configuration. No console provided which can be used locally in On-Premise machine.

·         All the monitoring and tracking data is reported to Atomsphere from On-premise Atom, which may be delayed during the high load scenarios.

·         While browsing the instances or viewing the process flow audit in Atomsphere, it directly fetches data from On-premise Atoms which results in slow performance.

4                    Integration Build, Deployments and Testing

·         The Integration/Process build is done through Atomsphere console. The build tab provides a limited unit testing feature as well.

·         The build console is a GUI with drag and drop configurable shapes for the process building.

·         The Atomsphere console is used for build and deployment of the processes to Atom cloud as well as On-Premise Atom.

4.1                Pros

·         Intuitive Browser based GUI for build and deployment.

·         Requires no separate installation of IDE in user’s computers.

·         Large set of Cloud applications connectors available for use with different Cloud applications integrations.

4.2                Cons

·         Complex mapping/transformation scenarios such as for-each, if-else etc. are not supported. Designed for one to one mapping of elements.

·         Lacks features such as Dynamic parallel execution within processes, multiple start points of processes, support for open source technology like XSLT etc.

·         Does not have in built features of JMS, a very feature limited Atom queue system is available. Atom queue cannot communicate between Atoms.

·         The unit testing feature is limited to some of the connectors and use cases.

·         No implementation of Session/Version control for cases where multiple developers might be working on same set of processes.

·         The processes/integrations cannot be exported or imported to and from Atomsphere, limits the developers access to code.

·         Only GUI view is available for the build, no source code exposed.

·         Complex management of the process artifacts, for example APIs are managed and deployed from API console while Build in Atomsphere console.

5                    Transaction Monitoring and Tracking

·         The transactions auditing, monitoring and tracking is done via Atomsphere, ApiSphere and Boomi Trust.

·         Processes transactions and their detailed auditing data is available through the Atomsphere.

·         The metrics related to web services and APIs are available through the ApiSphere.

·         The Environments and Atoms performance and availability related metrics are available in Boomi Trust console.

5.1                Pros

·         Monitoring and tracking data available to users anywhere having access to internet.

·         Provides filtering while searching for data based on range of predefined attributes.

5.2                Cons

·         Detailed diagnostics data not available for all artifacts used in process, this limits the diagnostics of errors in live systems.

·         Limited set of available data is fetched directly from Atom, which results in slow response.