The May 2021 release of the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform is here and we are thrilled to share it with you! In this release, we have significantly improved our API management offering. You can now build APIs with a Design First methodology. You can also seamlessly manage multiple versions of an API. We are making the platform more resilient with anomaly detection for pipelines and enhanced memory management. We are enhancing our ELT offering with support for Snowflake on Google Cloud, SCD2, etc. On the Snap front, we are adding a new Snap Pack for Twilio, new Snaps in our NetSuite and SAP Snap Packs, and more.
Flexibility and better ease-of-use in API development and management
Design First development is a common approach for API creation. It allows API developers to first define API interfaces that API consumers can build their applications against. Design First development speeds up the development and publication of APIs and enables organizations to get products to market quickly. The SnapLogic platform has for many years enabled users to create API endpoints from pipelines, an approach which is often referred to as a Code First or Pipeline First approach. But with the May 2021 release, we are also adding support for Design First API development. So as an API developer you can pick the option that best meets your needs.
With the Design First approach, when you import an OpenAPI/Swagger specification in JSON or YAML format, the platform automatically creates pipeline scaffolding and related resources depending on the API endpoints. You can then implement the APIs by building out the pipelines that service each endpoint.
We have also added support for API versioning with the May 2021 release. Support for API versioning enables API developers to add more functionality to APIs or optimize these APIs while continuing to serve existing API consumers. API developers can now create versions of an API by importing a new API specification with the API changes. API developers can manage assets and policies for each version independently.
To learn more about these SnapLogic API Management updates, checkout this video.
Improved resiliency and better ease of use with the platform updates
In the May 2021 release, we are adding a number of capabilities that improve platform resiliency and reduce the number of disruptions to your business to a minimum. Some of these changes are evident today while more are just around the corner.
First among these changes is the introduction of runtime anomaly detection which is really unique amongst our peers. This feature improves resiliency by identifying and alerting on pipelines that can cause node failures. The platform looks at time-series data of pipeline executions and alerts you when execution times exceed a predefined threshold, expressed as a percent of normal execution time.
The second key update that aids in improving resilience is better memory management of Snaps such as Group-by and Join that deal with large amounts of data and require significant memory resources. It is important to note that this is a universal problem regardless of your integration platform. And even though the benefit from these platform updates is the same, the solution is unique to each Snap. The Group-by Snap now uses dynamic sizing while the Join Snap spills data from the buffer to temp files on disk to achieve better node memory management and significantly reduce node failures.
The third key update that improves resiliency is a new widget that we introduced to the Snaplex Dashboard. The Memory Utilization widget in this dashboard allows you to correlate pipeline executions with spikes in memory utilization. You can now select a window of time and streamline debugging to identify and correct issues with respect to high resource utilization quickly.
To learn more about these platform updates, please check out this demo video.
Enhanced support to elastically scale Groundplex
Today, a number of SnapLogic customers use containerized SnapLogic nodes managed by Kubernetes in their Groundplexes. With May 2021 enhancements, we are now helping you go beyond CPU and memory metrics and leverage SnapLogic-specific parameters to make the Kubernetes scaling decisions. We are adding the execution node’s queue size as a metric that will allow you to dynamically scale up and down the nodes to save on operational costs associated with your infrastructure provider. Additionally, resources for the execution nodes gracefully terminate when the pipeline execution is complete.
Higher productivity and better support with ELT Enhancements
We continue to make our SnapLogic ELT offering more robust and you will see why from the May 2021 updates.
We now support Snowflake ELT on Google Cloud so regardless of where you run your Snowflake instance you can push down transformations to it with SnapLogic ELT.
We have added Slowly Changing Dimensions Type 2 (SCD2) support for ELT. SCD2 functionality is a key feature for data analytics use cases because it ensures analytical visibility even if the underlying data changes, such as changes to an employee’s home address or tracking sales across a region broken out by sales reps. SnapLogic has provided SCD2 support for all major cloud data warehouses for standard pipelines, but now you get the same support for ELT pipelines as well. Check out this video to learn more about SCD2 support for SnapLogic ELT.
We have made two other enhancements that improve user productivity when maintaining the target cloud data warehouse with SnapLogic ELT:
- A new ELT Execute command enables you to perform administrative tasks such as create, drop, or truncate a table, and for Snowflake, it also supports changing the size of the warehouse
- We have added an ability to automatically download JDBC driver files from a specified path for your cloud data warehouse thus reducing the manual effort required to maintain your ELT account.
Superior productivity and better experiences with new Snaps
We continue to enhance our Snap Catalog which now stands at over 600 Snaps to connect to SaaS applications, on-premises applications, databases, data warehouses, other data endpoints, protocols, data transformations, etc.
Our *NEW* Twilio Snap Pack allows you to create powerful communication experiences for your customers. Twilio is an API-based product with which you can send a text message, initiate a phone call, or leave a programmatic voice message. Our new Snap Pack provides CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) operations to operate on objects in Twilio and enables you to automate marketing workflows such as sending an alert to your SDR team when there is a hot lead or customer service workflows such as chatbots that intelligently respond to customer inquiries, and more. Check out this demo video on how you can easily send a Whatsapp message using Twilio and SnapLogic.
We have enhanced our NetSuite Snap Pack with a new snap: ‘Call RESTlet’. As the name suggests, it allows you to extend your investment in NetSuite RESTlets, which are server-side scripts that provide REST API like experience and also enable you to customize the behavior of pages and features in NetSuite. Even with REST and SOAP APIs available with NetSuite, RESTlets continue to provide the best performance when interacting with your NetSuite ERP system and this Snap allows you to do just that.
We have also added a new Snap to our SAP Snap Pack called ‘RFC Listener’. RFC stands for Remote Function Call. This Snap enables your SAP ERP system to respond to errors or take advantage of any feature or function from a non-SAP system in real-time. This Snap provides your SAP applications the ability to do synchronous communication with other SAP or non-SAP applications.
Improved connectivity with other Snap Pack enhancements
Here are a few other notable enhancements:
- DynamoDB Snap Pack: Support for auto-scaling and dynamic accounts
- Snowflake Snap Pack: Data transformation (reorder columns, change types) before bulk loading
- Microsoft Power BI Snap Pack: Support for DataFlows and DataFlow storage accounts in entity types
- Salesforce Snap Pack:
- Enhanced pass-through behavior for Snaps that use bulk API
- Support for CSV payload in bulk content type and null values in bulk API mode
- Binary Snap Pack
- Two-factor authentication for SFTP
- Flow Snap Pack
- HTTP Router Snap now supports Ultra pipelines
- Box and Hadoop Snap Pack:
- Support for retries with number of retries and retry interval
To get a complete list of Snap updates, please visit our documentation here.
If you missed the May 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 already 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.
