01 Introduction

Welcome! In this course, you'll get familiar with the Flowgear platform including its connectors and features. You'll also learn how to choose and apply the appropriate workflow pattern based on the type of integration or automation you're building.

Preparing for the course

If you haven't done so already, create a trial account in order to follow along with the areas being discussed. You'll also need a trial account in order to build and submit the practical exercises throughout this course.

Before you begin, you'll need to turn on certification mode. Do this from → My Activities & Certifications, Turn on certification Mode.

In this mode, you'll see a Submit Exercise button in the Workflow Design Pane. To use it, design your Workflow according to the exercise, run it to verify it works and click Submit Exercise. In the popup, select the exercise that the Workflow represents and click Submit.

When you have successfully submitted all of the exercises for the course, you'll be awarded a technical certification.

The value of low friction integration

Before we dive into the technical aspects of the course, let's talk about why integration is such a big topic today.

If you think back to years ago, many companies had a single ERP system, often a monolith within the organization, where they would bolt on applications or modules to achieve what they needed.

With the advent of the cloud, organizations have lost the ability to control data in the same way they once could. For example, they no longer have the option to simply move data across databases or file systems within their environment.

Cloud computing has led to a proliferation of specialized services, creating a larger demand for integration. Flowgear enables businesses to integrate not just their internal systems and apps but also with third parties like their customers, suppliers, and partners.

Without an integration strategy, businesses rely on "swivel chair integration", where employees manually re-key data from one system to another. This is obviously inefficient but also leads to data being fragmented across an organization.

Alternatively, organizations might resort to hand-coded integrations. While this approach can work initially for a small number of simple integrations, over time it becomes very difficult to adapt to changes in business processes and is likely to fail when the apps being integrated are upgraded.

Use cases for Flowgear

Broadly, Flowgear works wherever data needs to move from one app, service or party to another. Practically, most integrations fall under one of these categories:

• App to app integration - for example an e-commerce to ERP sync where orders placed in the e-commerce platform are sync'd as invoices in the ERP
• Webhook automation - for example Flowgear receives a web hook notifying that an order delivery status has changed
• API backend for mobile apps - for example providing a set of API's consumed by a consumer-facing self-serve app, negating the requirement for building a backend
• Warehousing - periodically acquiring data from larger number of disparate sources in order to stage them into a data warehouse for reporting purposes
• Custom business apps - Flowgear allows developers to create apps that embed directly into the Console which function as highly tailored business utility apps.

Flowgear removes complexity

When hand-coding integrations like those described above, much of the implementation effort is concerned with the specifics of the endpoint API's, concerns around how data is routed across networks, failure detection, retry logic and logging.

Flowgear seeks to alleviate as many of these concerns as possible so that implementers are able to focus on the business process that is being automated instead.

We publish an expanding suite of Connectors that wrap third party APIs so that implementers do not need to be concerned with these details.

Integrations are expressed visually using a familiar Workflow paradigm, making it easier for less technical implementers to build and manage workflows. The design Console acts like an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) by providing a way for implementers to quickly make a change and review the results without leaving the screen.

While cadence is important during initial design, control is more important once production workload is being processed. Flowgear provides a suite of Lifecycle features including version control (Revision Management) and Devops-style Release Management to support best practice.