Getting Started with Boomi: A Beginner’s Guide

In this digitalisation era, where most enterprises are going online, cloud-based integration platforms, namely Integration Platforms as a Service (iPaaS) are becoming a must and hence gaining a lot of traction. One iPaaS that offers its clients cloud-based services is Boomi. In this article, getting started with Boomi, we introduce this platform, explain its architecture, main components, and highlights.

Boomi, like other iPaaS solutions, makes it easy for companies to connect cloud-based applications and on-premise enterprise platforms. In this area, Boomi stands out as one of the most capable and well-known solutions, giving organisations access to a full range of integration options. Boomi streamlines and expedites the integration process, enabling businesses to maximise the potential of their data ecosystem with its unified approach, low-code development environment, and extensive library of pre-built connectors.

Boomi Architecture

Boomi uses cutting-edge and adaptable architecture. A self-updating runtime called Atom serves as the foundation of the design. Atoms can be hosted on the cloud and offered by Boomi where they are completely managed and scalable, or they can be self-managed that are hosted and managed by the client. If the client has requirements of integrating both cloud and on premise systems, a hybrid approach of Atoms can be used. To achieve scalability and high availability, Atoms can be grouped together under what is so called a Molecule. A molecule is nothing but a set of Atoms grouped together to achieve high-performance and scalable data processing for integration processes, without taking a hit from the licensing perspective.
The Boomi “AtomSphere” is the control plane cloud-based web portal that is used to automate all phases of the integrations, including designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining them.

As you can see in the above architecture diagram, Boomi AtomSphere (denoted by the Cloud Image) is the control plane, Atoms (or Molecules) are the runtimes where integrations are hosted (data plane). Atoms hosted on the cloud helps in integrating cloud-based applications, while Atoms hosted behind the company’s firewall are used to integrate on-premises enterprise applications & databases. Data on the Atoms doesn’t make its way into the AtomSphere platform, only metadata does, so data security is preserved.

Boomi’s Services

Boomi offers many services besides its integration platform. I’ll mention them briefly here, but will be focusing on the Integration platform only going forward

• Integration: Boomi’s main offering, it’s iPaaS platform that is used to integrate applications and data. This service will be our main discussion in this article.
• Master Data Hub (MDH): Boomi’s MDM offering, used to provide synchronised master data through what is called “golden records”
• API Management: Boomi’s APIM platform that is used to publish and manage APIs
• B2B / EDI Management: Effectively, part of Boomi Integration, specialised to collaborate with EDI partners
• Flow: Low-code cloud-native platform used to build applications and automate human workflows
• Data Catalog & Preparation: A lightweight cloud-native tool used to analyse, organise, and secures, and catalog organisation’s data
• Event Streams: Boomi’s last messaging offering that allows to create event-driven integrations. More on event streams can be found in a separate article on ihub4us.
• Boomi AI: A yet to-be-released offering by Boomi, that uses generative AI to create integrations

Boomi Main Components

Going forward, whenever I mention Boomi, I’m explicitly focused on Boomi’s Integration platform, it’s iPaaS offering, which is the main focus of this article.

Boomi has several main components which constitute its iPaaS platform. Those would be as follows

Boomi AtomSphere Platform

This is the control plane, where all the build, testing, administration, and monitoring occurs. It consists of four main sections which are easily viewable once logged in

Dashboard

This is where the monitoring dashboards are hosted. There are three main dashboards provided:

• Account Dashboard: This provide account-wide insights such as offline atoms, process errors, overall throughput, current executions, execution & document count
• HTTP Status Dashboard: This dashboard focuses on API’s and provides a pie chart showing the HTTP status code percentages
• Real-time Dashboard: This dashboard provides insights on low-latency processes. Low latency processes are processes in Boomi that are optimised for the best performance. That is done by not writing any execution logs (except for errors)

Build

The Build is the canvas where workflows are built in. Those workflows are called processes in Boomi’s terminology. The process consists of collections of activities called steps in Boomi, where each step performs a single function. Steps can be linked together using a straightforward “drag and drop” interface that does not require any scripting or coding.

Deploy

This is the section where we can deploy our processes to different environments. Boomi splits its deployment methodology into two operations: packaging and deployment. Packaging creates a deployable unit that bundles the process along with any of its dependencies. Deployment is simply deploying a package to a specific environment, such as dev, test, or production

Manage

This is the administration section of Boomi. Here you can fully manage your runtimes (Atoms / Molecules)

Also, you can view all current and previous executions of processes along with the execution data and logs, which is a critical feature for troubleshooting any issues that might arise

Atoms

Atoms are one of the main foundational components of Boomi. As described in the architecture section, an Atom is the runtime engine over which the processes stream data between various application databases, files, applications, and APIs. Once high availability and scalability is needed, Atoms can be grouped into a cluster of Atoms, called a Molecule. Molecule’s nodes work together to process integration tasks in parallel, enabling faster and more efficient data processing, as well as achieving scalability, and high availability in case any of the atoms go offline.

Again, an Atom (or Molecule) can be deployed on the cloud, or on the client’s servers. It could be hosted and managed by the client, by Boomi on their cloud infrastructure, or hosted by the client, and managed by Boomi. There’s a lot of flexibility there.

Connectors

These are nothing but the foundational activities that perform a single action of connecting to an external application. Boomi provides an extensive collection of pre-built connectors, that allow out-of-the-box connectivity to a wide range of programmes, databases, systems, and cloud services. These connectors make it easier to connect to and integrate with many endpoints.

Boomi Highlights

• Breadth of features: Boomi is a vast and mature platform that provides a vast amount of features that caters for virtually any integration scenario, such as application, data, API, realtime, near-real time, and batch scenarios.
• Rich APIM: Boomi allows to create API’s seamlessly, and their APIM platform on top of the integration platform is fully integrated with the Integration platform. The APIM platform provides features like API gateway, access control, rate limiting, and analytics. It doesn’t compete with main APIM players like Google Apigee & Kong, however, for the sake of internal APIs exposed on top of the iPaaS platform, it is more than enough
• Extensive Community & Ecosystem: Boomi has a thriving ecosystem and user and partner community. Users can access connectors, templates, and other integration materials created by Boomi and its partners through a marketplace that it provides. The community promotes cooperation and knowledge exchange by offering resources, assistance, and best practices. You can easily find Boomi help online in case of any issues. Also, there’s no shortage of Boomi developers in the market.
• State-of-Art Training & Certification Material: Boomi provides an exhaustive training courses and certification programs using its Boomi University portal, and all free of charge. In my opinion, Boomi is second to none of the iPaaS platforms in this area.
• Licensing Model: Last but not least, Boomi has a very efficient licensing model based on connections to external systems. On a high level, if you are connecting to 10 different applications, that’s 10 connections per environment. Without digging too deep into the licensing model of Boomi, what I can safely say as part of this tutorial, is that Boomi’s licensing model could be one of the most deterministic licensing models, i.e, a client can easily calculate and estimate how much Boomi is going to cost them beforehand.

Conclusion

A product that helps integrate data efficiently and easily from everywhere has become essential in this age of digitisation, where businesses are going online and customers are using the internet to satisfy their numerous needs. This is when Boomi excels. It aids companies in integrating cloud-based as well as enterprise platforms behind the company’s firewall.

The Boomi platform is a blessing for many businesses seeking efficiency and speed in integrating their plethora of systems. The integration development work can be done accurately, quickly, and in a shorter amount of time. Hence, greatly improving developer efficiency and time-to-market. All-in-all, Boomi offers a comprehensive platform that fulfils all integration needs, assisting companies in integrating and automating their invaluable business processes.