Getting Started with Workato: A Beginner’s Guide

Businesses now have an increasing difficulty in connecting their systems, data, and apps to improve operations and boost productivity. In this Getting Started with Workato article, we discuss Workato, a strong integration and automation platform that enables businesses to connect and automate their workflows at a completely new level. Businesses can eliminate data silos, enable seamless information interchange, and promote effective procedures throughout their whole ecosystem with Workato. 

Workato offers a complete solution for companies to link their apps, automate workflows, and speed up data transmission. By leveraging a visual, no-code interface, it allows users of all skill levels to create integrations and automations without the need of complex coding or even an IT staff. If you want to think a platform that democratises integration, first platform that should come to your mind is Workato.

In this post, we explore Workato’s architecture, core components and main highlights or advantages.

Architecture

Workato is a cloud-native iPaaS platform that leverages the scalability and flexibility of the cloud. This means that it doesn’t require any local installations, so clients can get going instantly without having to invest in any hardware or infrastructure components. Workato’s cloud-based microservices-based architecture guarantees reliability, high availability, automatic scalability, and the capacity to manage scenarios involving large-scale integrations.

Internally, but hidden from us, Workato leverages containerization to provide auto-scaling and high availability, which makes it one of the few integration platforms that truly implements a cloud-native architecture.

Figure 1: Workato’s Internal Architecture (Andres Ramirez 2022)

A truly detailed article which explains Workato’s internal architecture is published by Andres Ramirez on medium. The article explains how Workato’s microservices-based runtimes run over containers which allows each workflow or recipe to run independently from other recipes. This allows the recipes to achieve high availability, scalability, deduplication, guaranteed delivery and many other benefits. Luckily, using this cloud-native internal architecture, clients don’t need to care about all of these cross-cutting concerns and would need to only focus on the functional side of things without worrying if their integrations can handle the load or not, or whether they are available all the time or not, etc. This is a truly differentiating factor of Workato to some of the other well-known iPaaS solutions in the market.

Main Components

There are several components which predominantly constitute the Workato platform. I’ll discuss them in this section.

Projects

The Projects area is effectively where you build your workflows. In Workato’s terminology, those workflows are called recipes and you are licensed by the number of recipes you create. You can create as many projects as you want, and inside each project you can create a full folder hierarchy to host your recipes and connections. 

Connections

Connections are, as named, connections to external systems that you create when you are building your recipe. Those can then be reused across different recipes.

Recipes

Each recipe consists of a trigger and a set of actions. A trigger is the entry point and specifies how the recipe is started. Could be an event occurring in some application, like a lead created in Salesforce, or on a certain schedule. An action determines what work will be done in your recipe. Could be a call to an external application, like creating a customer in NetSuite for example, or they could be logical operators such as if/else or a while loop. Those are the steps that build your recipe or workflow.

Dashboard

The Dashboard is where you view insights and statistics around the executions of the recipes, called jobs in Workato’s terminology. You can view each job’s details, data, logs, as well as re-run jobs from here. You will also view your plan usage information here.

API Platform

The API platform is where you turn your recipes into APIs. This is where you define your API’s, hook them up to the recipes, select the HTTP method and access profiles (security method, policies). You can control everything related to the API management from here. It’s not a fully fledged API management platform, but it’s more than enough to expose your recipes as API’s and set security and basic policies such as throttling, rate limiting, IP filtering and the likes.

Administration

You can administer the Workato platform predominantly using the Tools menu. There are a lot of features to set up here such as defining environment specific properties, viewing logs, defining lookup tables, on-premise group agents, setting the human tasks inbox, the pub/sub, lifecycle management (export/import packages across environments), and Workbots.

Each of aforementioned features deserves their own article to discuss it, however i’ll focus on a couple which are extremely important and foundational in Workato: namely the Workbots and the on-premise agent (OPA)

Workbots

Workato Workbots are a powerful feature of Workato that allows you to create chatbots in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Facebook Workplace to automate business processes directly from those applications. This allows somebody to use Slack for example to fully automate an employee onboarding process without leaving Slack. The Workbot integrates with Workato recipes to orchestrate the full business process workflow

Onprem-OPA

Since Workato is a fully SaaS platform that runs on the cloud, how would it be able to connect to applications and databases sitting behind the organisation’s firewall? Here comes Workato on-premise Agent (and Agent Group) to the rescue. Workato OPA is a lightweight agent that can be installed within the organisation’s network. This establishes a secure connection between Workato cloud and the organisation’s on-premise applications, databases, and folders without having to open ports in the corporate firewall. The OPA can be scaled by grouping multiple OPAs under the same OPA Group. 

Automation HQ & Workspaces

Workato’s comprehensive platform revolves around the concept of a Workato Workspace, which serves as the hub for users to access and oversee their integration processes. Within a Workspace, users can seamlessly log in to create, manage, administer, and monitor their integrations. Workato takes integration management to a higher level by offering a centralised platform capable of handling multiple workspaces. Each workspace can be dedicated to a specific business unit within an organisation, allowing for granular control and flexibility. This means that organisations can have multiple workspaces tailored to their unique needs. 

To streamline the management and governance of these workspaces, Workato provides Automation HQ, a tool that enables centralised control and oversight across all workspaces. Automation HQ ensures seamless administration, monitoring, and governance of all Workspaces in place.

Highlights

• One of the most easy to use and intuitive integration platforms one could work on. It is citizen integrator friendly and hence, could be used to create automations by business users across the enterprise without relying on the IT department.
• As discussed in the architecture section, Workato is an auto scalable SaaS platform based internally on containerization to achieve high scalability, availability, and optimal performance. This also completely removes the burden of any infrastructure management and cost as everything is hosted and runs from the cloud.
• Main architectural concerns are handled out-of-the-box such as guaranteed delivery, message sequence, and de-duplication. This allows the developer to focus on the functional requirements of the integrations rather than spending most of his time trying to address those non-functional problems. What makes this possible internally is the event persistence architecture and using a durable cursor position that points out to the last successful row being processed.

• Workbots, human tasks, and full integration with Slack or MS Teams for automating business processes
• Workato uses machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to improve integration operations. With the use of intelligently suggested field mappings based on contextual understanding, it aids in automating data mapping between different applications. 
• GEARS Framework: This is not part of the product per say. It’s a governance and Center of Excellence (CoE) framework that Workato offers to help set up your Integration & Automation CoE team. So  you can consider it as one of the perks of adopting Workato as an Integration & Automation platform.

Conclusion

As an integration and automation platform that enables businesses to integrate their applications, automate tasks & workflows, and optimise data transmission, Workato stands apart. Workato provides a complete solution for seamless integration and process automation thanks to its cloud-native architecture, large library of connectors, pre-built recipes, and intelligent automation features. The platform’s user-friendly and futuristic design, chatbot capabilities, and emphasis on ease of use and quick turn-over, all add to its appeal. Organisations may increase productivity, efficiency, and business agility with the help of Workato. Employing Workato’s capabilities enables businesses to realise the full potential of their systems and apps, accelerating digital transformation and meeting integration and automation objectives.

References

Andres Ramires 2022, iPaaS: Beware of the cloud-imposters
https://medium.com/@andresalonso.ramirez/ipaas-beware-of-the-cloud-imposters-9d4f603bd644