fortnight /ˈfɔːtnʌɪt/ noun

(Cambridge Dictionary).

I am Asser Junnila and the latest addition to the team of Pre-sales architects at Frends. Previously, my job has been on the other side of the table working on architecture in-house for a company. Now I have been given a chance to help those over the table make their architecture more efficient with Frends. This switch to a sales organization with a product unfamiliar to me was a leap of faith, but I have been very impressed so far.

Here are my impressions of Frends eiPaas during the first fortnight

On the first day, all the practical stuff like laptop, accessories, access rights, and even my own Frends sandbox were up and running so I could start learning about this platform and company right away. 

Although I have experience with other integration tools and consider myself a quick learner, the ease of using Frends surprised me. All the inspirational slides about efficiency and time-to-value, which I always take with a bucket of salt, started to make sense. I needed to and still need to remind myself to be critical and objective about this platform, but I was sold, to say the least. 

The first week was fast-paced and hectic at times, as I learned many new things, familiarized myself with the different capabilities, and deployed all kinds of applications on the cloud agents and on my laptop agent for testing purposes. Oh, shall I mention how easy it was to deploy, as Frends has the built-in CI/CD pipelines? If I were just buying Frends for my own company, I would be able to deliver value and deploy integration services on the very same day. 

Learning the practical side

Already in the first two weeks, I accompanied other pre-sales architects on product demos and presentations for potential customers. The implemented use cases looked so clear and effortless; indeed, the platform makes it possible to be so. Once you get the hang of the modeling notation, it is straightforward to plan what you want the integration process to do and fill in the detailed parameters or conditions when the overall process flow is designed. One of the most beautiful aspects of Frends is the readability of the processes, as almost anyone can view them and figure out quickly what is happening at first glance. Of course, the key is to document along the way, but that's the case with every development tool. 

With Frends, the threshold is minimal because of the notation language and the friendly graphical User Interface on the browser. In addition to the process notation for the development, its reuse in logging is fantastic: as you can visually inspect the process elements, use color-coding, and log information about every process execution instance. Oh, and the comprehensive logging… It's built-in too! 

Frends has lots of ready-made functionality fulfilling the primary use cases. When I need to implement something custom, I can just write C#, which makes my possibilities unlimited. When I want to reuse, share, and increase the readability of functionality in a process, I can just wrap this piece of C# to a Frends Task, i.e., a custom component or a connector. For a technical guy like me, this widens my toolkit for using Frends with basically unlimited possibilities as a synchronous integration tool. 

The only downside, I could think of, is the full functionality for asynchronous integrations in event-driven architecture if you were looking for a do-it-all platform. Although, separation of concerns in terms of integration platforms, in this case, sounds sensible. Fortunately, Frends can easily support event-driven architecture as an event producer or subscriber with already implemented connectors. 

My reflections and what I am planning to do next

My fortnight's main takeaway is that Frends lands in the sweet spot of adaptability, extensibility, and a short learning curve. I do understand that modern iPaaS products give out a rich selection of functionalities that fulfill the basic use cases, but the beauty of Frends is the whole package supporting customization in a variety of environment setups with the “usually trickiest” parts like logging and CI/CD pipelines built-in. The confidence of sales personnel and other pre-sales architects is easily justified. Also, the roots of this product are in Finland, which resonates with me personally. 

So, my first weeks have been superb and sweet, right? In short, yes. While writing this blog post, it was also funny to realize that I have become living proof of how easy it is to implement integrations with Frends’ low-code. 

Next, I could go on about the capabilities of hybrid environment deployments with agents on the cloud and on-premises, but I'll leave that to some other time. As of now, I am planning to keep practicing implementing my own Frends Tasks to execute something miscellaneous, fun, and educational. I'm looking forward to diving deeper into Frends and helping customers adopt an iPaaS as part of their architecture. 

Till next time,

Asser Junnila, Pre-sales Architect, Frends