Platform Features
Alumio is equipped with great technical features that make integrations simple. In the next course, we will take a look at how these features work in practice, but for now, let’s familiarize ourselves with what they are.
Here’s how Alumio enables the creation of connections in an easy way:
The Alumio HTTP connection features work perfectly to create connections with Rest (also known as RESTful API and stands for Representational State Transfer) and ODATA (the Open Data Protocol).
Configure HTTP clients and use them to interface with HTTP endpoints using HTTP-compliant methods. Requests can be expanded to contain post-data. Authentication methods like OAuth 2.0 can be configured on an HTTP client.
PDO is a lightweight abstraction layer for accessing databases.
Configure database clients to fetch and post database data, execute stored procedures, etc. Alumio offers database drivers for Oracle, IBM, CUBRID, MS SQL Server, Firebird, Informix, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, ODBC, and DB2.
SOAP support is an extension of the Alumio HTTP elements, including authentication. This protocol may not always be the leading protocol, but it is still widely in use.
Configure clients to connect to a SOAP service to fetch and post data. Alumio offers a solution to adapt to the inherent differences between SOAP services, like adding a custom authentication envelope or changes to the message structure.
Filesystems are interfaced with using Flysystem, which is an abstraction layer to standardize filesystem interactions agnostically.
Configure filesystems to read and write files on services like FTP, SFTP, AWS S3, HTTP, etc. Filesystem interactions are performed stateless.
Webhooks (triggered incoming connections)
Alumio can receive triggers to start routes from external endpoints. Webhooks allow systems to send automated messages or information to Alumio. It’s a powerful way to automatically push data from one app to another.
HTTP Proxy (transparent real-time connections)
Alumio can function as an HTTP proxy between two endpoints for HTTP requests. Instead of sending HTTP messages directly to an endpoint, messages can be sent through Alumio. Alumio will forward the requests to the endpoint and return the response that it receives as if the endpoint was called directly. This gives every existing connection that uses the Alumio HTTP Proxy the logging capabilities that Alumio offers.
Additionally, the platform offers users several out-of-the-box features that can be used to create authentications:
- Basic authentication
- Bearer token authentication
- Oauth2 authentication
- Query param authentication
- Wsse authentication
- NTLM authentication
To make things even simpler, the platform also has connector templates:
Connector templates are pre-configured working integrations for certain data formats that have been saved as a template. These connector templates help kickstart integrations with a lot of the work already done. We will dive into how to use connectors in the following course, so stay tuned to see how they work in practice!
Data mapping features:
The 'Mapping Features' enable the mapping or transformation of "data" so that e.g., system A data output matches the 'format' that system B is able to process. Besides 'Mapping' the data, it is also possible to 'filter out' data to prevent unnecessary queue items.
Data transformation features:
Transformers allow data selection/reduction, translation/mapping, encoding, calculation, sorting/ordering, merging/joining/lookup from other sources, aggregation, generation of surrogate keys, transposing/pivoting of array/object keys and values, and validation. Transformers also filter out entire data points produced by incoming configurations, preventing unnecessary queue items.
Transformers allow business logic to decide whether the transformer will be applied to the given data. When transformers are combined with Alumio features to 'store data', data flows can be combined, data can be compared to create 'update' or 'delete' data feeds, and much more.
We will also take a closer look at how data mapping and transformation features work in the next lesson.
Monitoring & logging
Alumio logs all data and events during the processing of incoming and outgoing data. This log information is displayed for each task that's created and each subscriber/publish action as well as synchronized and collected to an Elastic Stack data log. To monitor the log data, triggers can be created within the Elastic Stack to alert when several tasks fail within a single hour. Additionally, Notifications can be configured to several communication channels to alert users whenever something goes wrong within their integrations.
