WSO2 Unfurls Choreo Integration Service for Cloud-Native APIs
WSO2 has made generally available Choreo, a cloud service for integrating cloud-native microservices based on Kubernetes, Docker containers and Envoy proxy software.
Asanka Abeysinghe, chief technology evangelist for WSO2, notes that IT organizations can now employ a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that WSO2 maintains instead of having to build and maintain a platform for integrating microservices.
Built using VS Code tools developed by Microsoft, Choreo enables both the integration and development and management of application programming interfaces (APIs) using a rapid development environment that employs a combination of interchangeable graphical sequence diagram composition and code-based development tools where changes in one automatically manifest in the other.
Chroeo also makes use of Ballerina, an open source programming language that makes it easier to create cloud-native network services that can be ported to other platforms to ensure that IT teams don’t get locked into the Choreo platform.
Other features include a developer marketplace for APIs, an automated continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, integration with GitHub, role-based access controls (RBAC), identity access management (IAM) tools and lifecycle management capabilities.
Abeysinghe says the need for an integration platform becomes more apparent as IT teams start to build, maintain and update hundreds of microservices. In some instances, IT teams attempt to build a platform on top of a service mesh. In other instances, they attempt to employ a legacy integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environment that is not optimized for microservices. Choreo is designed to simplify creating and managing microservices at a higher level of abstraction that is more accessible to a much wider range of developers.
Choreo today supports microservices that communicate over HTTP, but Abeysinghe says support for other API formats such as GraphQL will be added shortly. The goal, he says, is to provide an integration platform that can support a wide range of APIs.
APIs are, of course, now at the core of every modern application development initiative. However, it is not always clear who within an IT team manages APIs after a developer creates them. Historically, developers have managed them, but as modern application environments continue to evolve, centralized IT teams are starting to play a larger role as the number of internal and external-facing APIs used explodes. Securing those APIs has also become a major issue, as cybercriminals increasingly discover how to programmatically exfiltrate data via misconfigured APIs.
Choreo is making a case for a platform that can be used by both developers and IT operations teams to manage APIs. API management is now evolving into the equivalent of a team sport within many IT organizations. The challenge now is determining how the members of those teams should perform their duties without getting in the way of each other.
