In the modern business landscape, efficient integration of applications and data is vital in operational success. Jitterbit, an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), is one of the platforms at the forefront of this integration revolution. Jitterbit empowers organizations to seamlessly connect their systems and data sources, breaking down silos and optimizing processes. In this introductory guide, getting started with Jitterbit, we jump into the world of Jitterbit, exploring how it enables automation, scalability, and enhanced business insights to drive digital transformation and business efficiency.
Jitterbit Architecture
Jitterbit uses cutting-edge and adaptable architecture. The runtime called Agent serves as the foundation of the design. Agents can be hosted on the cloud and offered by Jitterbit 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 Agents can be used. To achieve scalability and high availability, Agents can be grouped together under what is called an Agent Group. An Agent Group is nothing but a set of Agents grouped together to achieve high-performance and scalable data processing for integration processes, without taking a hit from the licensing perspective.
The Jitterbit Harmony Portal 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, Jitterbit Harmony is the control plane, Agents (or Agent Groups) are the runtimes where integrations are hosted (data plane). Agents hosted on the cloud are called Cloud Agent Groups. They help in integrating cloud-based applications, while Agents hosted behind the company’s firewall are called Private Agent Groups, and are used to integrate on-premises enterprise applications & databases. Data on the Agents doesn’t make its way into the Harmony platform, only metadata does, so data security is preserved.
Jitterbit’s Services
Jitterbit offers many services or applications in its Harmony platform. We’ll mention them briefly here:
- Cloud Studio: This is where you design your integrations in a web-based drag-and-drop designer. A similar thick client component called “Design Studio” exists, however we will be focusing on the cloud studio as all major enhancements are being done on the cloud studio. The design studio continues to exist to support existing clients who already use it.
- API Manager: Jitterbit’s APIM platform that is used to publish and manage APIs
- Vinyl: Low-code cloud-native platform used to build applications
- Marketplace: A service used to download integration templates built by the community.
- Management Console: Jitterbit’s administration and monitoring console. This is where you define your agents, environments, queues, view projects, dashboards, and licensing information
- EDI: Used to connect, manage and maintain EDI trading partners.
Jitterbit Main Components
Jitterbit has several main components which constitute its iPaaS platform. Those would be as follows
Jitterbit Cloud Studio
The cloud studio is the canvas where workflows are built in. The workflow consists of collections of operations. Each operation contains several activities, where each activity performs a single function. Activities are automatically linked together in an operation. There are three types of activities
- Connectors: these are the activities that calls external systems
- Script: these are activities that you can use to write code which contains any kind of logic
- Transformation: these are activities that transform from one schema to another.
It’s worth noting that in Jitterbit there’s no logical activities. Any kind of logic needs to be done in code via the script activity.
The cloud studio is also where you deploy your components to different environments
Connectors
These are nothing but the foundational activities that perform a single action of connecting to an external application. Jitterbit 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.
Transformation Engine
Jitterbit includes a powerful transformation engine that allows you to map, transform, and validate data as it moves between different systems. This is essential for ensuring data compatibility and consistency.
Management Console
This is the administration section of Jitterbit. Here you can manage your runtimes (Agents / Agent Groups).
This is also where the monitoring dashboards are hosted, where you will be able to view statistics around the number of successful operations, failed operations, running or pending operations, as well as system status information such as the agents configured, licensing usage, and platform status.
API Platform
The Jitterbit Harmony API Manager (API Manager) online interface allows you to construct and publish developer-friendly APIs as well as manage all aspects of an API’s lifecycle. Beware, this is a basic API manager that is sufficient for basic API scenarios, however if you are looking for a fully fledged API manager that is suitable to expose your APIs publicly, suggest looking into a specialized API manager in the market such as Google Apigee or Kong.
Agents
Agent are one of the main foundational components of Jitterbit. As described in the architecture section, an Agent 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, Agents can be grouped into a cluster of Agents, called Agent Group. Agent Group 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 Agents go offline.
Again, an Agent can be deployed on the cloud, or on the client’s servers. It could be hosted and managed by the client or by Jitterbit on their cloud infrastructure. There’s a lot of flexibility there.
EDI
This is where you can manage your trading partners and view, reprocess or re-acknowledge their associated transactions. This is a fairly new offering by Jitterbit, but there’s a lot of effort and focus being put into the EDI world by Jitterbit, so expect fast and rapid improvements to this area.
Jitterbit Highlights
- Breadth of features: Jitterbit provides many features and services that cater for virtually any integration scenario, such as application, data, API, realtime, near-real time, and batch scenarios. The platform is continuously growing as well and new features / components are being added all the time. For example Jitterbit message queuing and EDI components were ones of the most recent additions to the platform. The roadmap is ambitious and you can expect many other features on the way.
- Powerful Transformation Engine: Jitterbit transformation engine is one of the most powerful out there. Don’t be fooled by its easy to use drag-and-drop designer, behind that there’s a wide range of functions and script editor where you can virtually perform any kind of transformation.
- Extensive Community & Ecosystem: Jitterbit has a thriving ecosystem and user and partner community. Users can access connectors, templates, and other integration materials created by Jitterbit and its partners through a marketplace that it provides.
- Managed Services: Jitterbit offers managed services as part of their engagements with clients. So if you want to outsource the integration capability and don’t want to manage it internally, Jitterbit becomes one of the most viable options.
- Licensing Cost: If you are looking for a cost-effective platform that doesn’t break the bank, Jitterbit can be one of the most cost-effective ones in the market.
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 an iPaaS such as Jitterbit comes into play. It aids companies in integrating cloud-based as well as enterprise platforms behind the company’s firewall.
The Jitterbit platform is an aid for many businesses seeking efficiency and speed in integrating their plethora of systems, without giving up on the ability to write code as part of your integration solutions. The integration development can be done accurately, quickly, and in a shorter amount of time. Hence, greatly improving developer efficiency and time-to-market. All-in-all, Jitterbit offers a cost-effective platform that fulfils many integration needs, assisting companies in integrating and automating their invaluable business processes.