Talend has made its integration platform natively available on the Microsoft Azure cloud to provide DevOps teams employing Azure DevOps with an easier approach to creating pipelines and integrating data.
Vincent Lam, head of cloud product marketing for Talend, said the company is now making available 900 connectors and components to DevOps teams that use the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform Microsoft offers as a service.
By providing deep hooks into the Azure platform, Lam says Talend is looking to make it easier for teams to build applications by relying on an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environment to access data stored in Microsoft cloud services such as Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Databricks, Azure Data Lake Store and Azure HDInsight.
From a DevOps perspective, the Azure DevOps Orchestration engine has now been integrated with Talend’s zero-install continuous integration capability, which it created as part of an effort to integrate its integration service with CI/CD platforms such as Jenkins. That effort made it possible to leverage CI orchestration tools to automatically build unit tests and package Talend jobs in an artifact repository. That capability has now been extended to Azure DevOps.
Not every organization that uses Azure will employ Azure DevOps because they may have already standardized on another CI/CD platform, which they prefer to deploy and manage. However, because Azure lowers the barrier to entry for employing DevOps to build applications, Talend is now seeing a lot of demand for an iPaaS environment on Azure, Lam said.
Regardless of platform, as organizations start to build cloud-native applications based on microservices, many of them underestimate the integration challenges they will face. Each microservice has its own application programming interface that needs to be built and supported, which in turn is driving more convergence of DevOps platforms and iPaaS environments to help manage the APIs on which those microservices depend. As a result, IT organizations today need to apply more forethought to their overall API strategy, said Lam.
Talend is not the only provider of an integration platform to appreciate the role that DevOps processes and the rise of microservices are having on driving increased consumption of integration services. But it’s not clear whether access to integration services will become more democratized across IT organizations. Rather than continuing to rely on “centers of excellence” to centrally manage integration projects, many IT organizations have come to realize DevOps teams need to be able to access integration capabilities on demand. To facilitate that process, vendors such as Talend are making a concerted effort to couple integration platforms tightly with various DevOps platforms.
It remains to be seen to what degree integration platforms will remain standalone platforms versus becoming a capability to be invoked within the context of a CI/CD pipeline. Given the volume of monolithic applications that still depend on centrally managed integration platforms, it may be a while before the integration platform becomes subsumed in DevOps platforms. In the meantime, however, the line between DevOps and integration platforms will surely get more blurry.
