The August 2021 release of the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform is here and we are really excited to introduce a new addition to our platform, SnapLogic Flows! SnapLogic Flows is a newly designed, guided user experience for business users that greatly simplifies the building of integrations and automations. Another significant update to our platform is that starting with the August release, all SnapLogic product upgrades will not incur ANY downtime. Additionally, we have improved our API management offering with a refreshed Developer Portal and additional support for the complete lifecycle management of APIs. We have added ELT support for Databricks Delta Lake, a Shopify Snap Pack, new Snaps to connect to Tableau, Zuora, and many more updates.
Intelligent Integration for Everyone!
Business users face an uphill battle when automating business processes that can positively impact business outcomes. While they are intimately familiar with these processes, they have limited control over automating their respective business processes as they are too often dependent on IT. Business users need a better approach with which they can take back control and automate business processes themselves, whenever they need them.
SnapLogic Flows makes business process automation easy for every business user. Flows increases productivity across all business units in the enterprise using a guided approach to connecting cloud applications and data. Flows allow business users to reduce or eliminate common manual tasks. It provides a modern interface and approach with features such as in-app documentation so that you can always get help without having to leave the UI. It is also a no-code UX, where even data manipulations can be done with Excel-like functions which are intuitive for every business user.
While business users are empowered to build integrations in Flows, IT is still firmly in control. With Flows, IT can manage user access and provide governance and security for all of the company’s integration assets. Flows is built on the SnapLogic platform that provides enterprise-grade scalability with over 2.5 trillion documents processed per month, security and compliance with standards such as SOC2 Type II, SSAE18 Type II, HIPAA etc., and reliability with a robust, zero downtime platform.
To learn more about how you can automate business processes quickly with Flows, check out this demo video.
Zero Downtime Upgrades
As you know, the the SnapLogic platform is updated once every quarter. Over the last year, we have reduced the amount of downtime incurred due to these platform upgrades. We are happy to announce that starting with the August release, all future SnapLogic product releases will not incur ANY downtime and will be non-disruptive to customers. Customers no longer need to plan around the release upgrades and all SnapLogic user interfaces – from Designer, Manager, and Dashboard to Flows and Fast Data Loader – will all be accessible during the release upgrades.
Full Lifecycle API Management and Better Self-service for API Consumers
We continue to enhance our API Management offering to make it best-in-class. With the August 2021 release, we are adding additional features for the complete lifecycle management of APIs so that you can effectively manage your API products and efficiently serve internal and external API consumers. With the new updates, API developers can unpublish APIs so that they are removed from the Developer Portal. API developers can now deprecate older APIs so as to focus their development efforts on newer versions of the APIs. Deprecated APIs remain active but indicate that a new version should be used instead. API developers can also retire older versions to lower their maintenance efforts. Once retired, the API is removed from the Developer Portal and requests to the API endpoint return an error code. To learn more about these capabilities, please check out this video.
We have also provided a major redesign with some additional functionality to the API Developer Portal. A new Portal Manager enables API admins to customize the Developer Portal with a custom URL, a thumbnail, a banner image, and links to the company website and terms and conditions page. APIs on the Developer Portal can also be grouped into categories so that API consumers can find APIs easily. API consumers can also get detailed information about the APIs such as request and response schemas, error codes, messages, etc with a familiar Swagger-style format. All this functionality significantly promotes better reuse of APIs and accelerates time-to-market for API consumers. To learn more about the refreshed API Developer Portal, check out this demo video.
ELT Support for Databricks Delta Lake
With the August 2021 release of the SnapLogic platform, our ELT offering is even more robust with new support for Databricks Delta Lake. Similar to how we support cloud data warehouses, ELT offering for Delta Lake enables customers to visually define transformations they want to execute in Delta Lake. SnapLogic’s ELT offering is unique when compared with other integration platforms because we don’t force users to write complex SQL queries and instead, users can visually design ELT transformations without writing a single line of code/SQL. ELT for Databricks Delta Lake enables our customers to make data and insights available to the business sooner by transforming data in place, without paying the penalty of latency incurred by transformations outside of a data warehouse/data lakehouse platform.
To learn more about how you can leverage SnapLogic ELT for Databricks Delta Lake, please check out this demo video.
Improved Connectivity and Productivity with New Snaps
Our *NEW* Shopify Snap Pack allows you to easily integrate this leading e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems with core enterprise systems such as ERP, CRM, Inventory Management, Supply Chain Management, and more. The Shopify Snap Pack allows you to integrate the store, order, product, and transaction data in Shopify with other systems and helps you quickly automate workflows such as automating sales operations when a new customer order comes in, and automating order fulfillment and tracking to ensure timely delivery and happy customers! To learn more about the Shopify Snap Pack, please visit the documentation page.
We have enhanced our Zuora Snap Pack with out-of-the-box connectivity to Zuora’s REST API to manage subscriptions from order to revenue. Previously this Snap Pack provided connectivity via a SOAP API which is being deprecated. SnapLogic customers can now leverage the REST Snaps rather than doing custom work to connect to the Zuora endpoint.
We have also added new Snaps to support Tableau Hyper, Tableau’s in-memory data engine. With the new Hyper Snaps, you can load data faster – for example, a data load of 1 billion records is 10x faster with Tableau Hyper. You can also create and refresh extracts faster for large data sets.
Here are a few other notable enhancements:
- REST Snap Pack: We have added support for AWS Signature V4 account to easily integrate with AWS services such as ElasticSearch, ElastiCache, and ElasticMapReduce
- Kafka Snap Pack: A Producer Snap now supports Avro format. Kafka Consumer Snap already supports the Avro format. With this additional support, Kafka Snap Pack now also supports Schema Registry enabling storage and retrieval of schema for Kafka Topics
- PostgreSQL Snap Pack: The latest update improves the performance by 3-4x for bulk loading to a PostgreSQL database
- *New* Binary Copy Snap: We have added a new Snap that makes a binary copy of input documents
- Amazon SQS Snap Pack: Now accepts messages larger than 256KB. It leverages Amazon S3 through an extended client library and allows you to publish and consume large messages
To get a complete list of Snap updates, please visit our documentation here.
If you missed the August 2021 product release webinar, you can watch it here and hear from our product team. You can always learn more about these updates by visiting the SnapLogic Documentation.
If you are not yet part of the SnapLogic Community, join the conversation here. Engage with others and get your questions answered, and for upcoming product releases check out the ‘Product Updates’ section in the community to get your first glimpse into what is coming next.
Author’s Note (Dec 2022): SnapLogic Flows is no longer available to new customers. We are working to bring the Flows user experience into the SnapLogic Designer.
