Meaningful automation in Python
This article is an introduction to meaningful automation, integrations and interoperability with Zato, service-oriented thinking and Python.
Zato is a convenient and secure, Python-based, open-source, service-oriented platform for automation, integrations and interoperability. It is used to connect distributed systems or data sources and to build API-focused, middleware and backend applications.
The platform is designed and built specifically with Python users in mind - often working in, and for, industries such as telecommunications, defense, health care and others that require automation, integrations and interoperability of multiple systems and processes.
Sample real-world, mission-critical Zato environments include:
Systems for telecommunication operators integrating CRM, ERP, Charging Systems, Billing and other OSS/BSS applications internal or external to the operators, including network automation of packet brokers and other network visibility and cybersecurity tools from Keysight
Enterprise services buses for government, helping in the digital transformation of legacy systems and processes towards modern capabilities
AI, ML and data science systems that analyze and improve acquisition and supply chain activities in government processes
Applied observability automation that enables meaningful decision making through the orchestration and coordination of the collection, distribution and presentation of data spread across a pool of independent systems
Platforms for health care and public administration systems, helping to achieve data interoperability through the integration of independent data sources, databases and health information exchanges (HIE)
Global IoT platforms for hybrid integrations of medical devices and software both in the cloud and on premises
Cybersecurity automation, including IT/OT hardware and software assets
Robotic process automation (RPA) of message flows and events produced by early warning systems
Zato offers connectors to all the popular technologies and vendors, such as REST, Cloud, task scheduling, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Atlassian, SAP, Odoo, SQL, HL7, FHIR, AMQP, IBM MQ, LDAP, Redis, MongoDB, WebSockets, SOAP, Caching and many more.
Running in the cloud, on premises, or under Docker, Kubernetes and other container technologies, Zato services are optimized for high performance and security - it is easily possible to run hundreds and thousands of services on typical server instances as offered by Amazon, Google Cloud, Azure or other cloud providers.
Zato servers offer high availability and no-downtime deployment. Servers form clusters that are used to scale systems both horizontally and vertically.
The product is commercial open-source software with training, professional services and enterprise 24x7x365 support available.
A platform and language for interesting, reusable and atomic services
Zato promotes the design of, and helps you build, solutions composed of services that are interesting, reusable and atomic (IRA).
What does it really mean in practice that something is interesting, reusable and atomic? In particular, how do we define what is interesting?
Each interesting service should make its users want to keep using it more and more. People should immediately see the value of using the service in their processes. An interesting service strikes everyone as immediately useful in wider contexts, preferably with few or no conditions, prerequisites and obligations.
An interesting service is aesthetically pleasing, both in terms of its technical usage as well as its relevance to, and potential applicability in, fields broader than originally envisioned. If people check the service and say "I know, we will definitely use it" or "Why don't we use it" you know that the service is interesting. If they say "Oh no, not this one again" or "No, thanks, but no" then it is the opposite.
Note that focus here is on the value that the service brings for the user. You constantly need to keep in mind that people generally want to use services only if they allow them to fulfill their plans or execute some bigger ideas. Perhaps they already have them in mind and they are only looking for technical means of achieving that or perhaps it is your services that will make a person realize that something is possible at all, but the point is the same, your service should serve a grander purpose.
This mindset, of wanting to build things that are useful and interesting is not specific to Python or, indeed, to software and technology. Even if you are designing and implementing services for your own purposes, you need to act as if you were a consultant that can always see a bigger vision, a bigger architecture, and who can envision results that are still ahead in the future while at the same time not forgetting that it is always a series of small interesting actions, that everyone can relate to, that lead to success.
A curious observation can be made, particularly when you consider all the various aspects of the digital transformation that companies and organizations go through, is that many people to whom the services are addressed, or who sponsor their development, are surprised when they see what automation and integrations are capable.
Put differently, many people can only begin to visualize bigger designs once they see in practice smaller, practical results that further their missions, careers and otherwise help them at work. This is why, again, the focus on being interesting is essential.
At the same, it can be at times advantageous to you that people will not see automation or integrations coming. That lets you take the lead and build a center of such a fundamental shift around yourself. This is a great position to be in, a blue ocean of possibilities, because it means little to no competition inside an organization that you are a part of.
If you are your own audience, that is, if you build services for your own purposes, the same principles apply and it is easy to observe that thinking in services lets you build a toolbox of reusable, complementary capabilities, a portfolio, that you can take with you as you progress in your career. For instance, your services, and your work, can concentrate on a particular vendor and with a set of services that automate their products, you will be always able to put that into use, shorting your own development time, no matter who employs you and in what way.
Regardless of who the clients that you build the solutions for are, observe that automation and integrations with services are evolutionary and incremental in their nature, at least initially. Yes, the resulting value can often be revolutionary but you do not intend to incur any massive changes until there are clear, interesting results available. Trying to integrate and change existing systems at the same time is doable, but not trivial, and it is best left to later stages, once your automation gets the necessary buy-in from the organization.
Services should be ready to be used in different, independent processes. The processes can be strictly business ones, such as processing of orders or payments, or they can be of a deep, technical nature, e.g. automating cybersecurity hardware. What matters in either case is that reusability breeds both flexibility and stability.
There is inherent flexibility in being able to compose bigger processes out of smaller blocks with clearly defined boundaries, which can easily translate to increased competitive advantage when services are placed into more and more areas. A direct result of this is a reduction in R&D time as, over time, you are able to choose from a collection of loosely-coupled components, the services, that hide implementation details of a particular system or technology that they automate or integrate with.
Through their continued use in different processes, services can reduce overall implementation risks that are always part of any kind of software development - you will know that you can keep reusing stable functionality that has been already well tested and that is used elsewhere.
Because services are reusable, there is no need for gigantic, pure waterfall-style implementations of automation and integrations in an organization. Each individual project can contribute a smaller set of services that, as a whole, constitute the whole integrated environment. Conversely, each new project can start to reuse services delivered by the previous ones, hence allowing you to quickly, incrementally, prove the value of the investment in service-oriented thinking.
To make them reusable, services are designed in a way that hides their implementation details. Users only need to know how to invoke the service; the specific systems or processes it automates or integrates are not necessarily important for them to know as long as a specific business goal is achieved. Thanks to that, both services and what they integrate can be replaced without disrupting other parts - in reality, this is exactly what happens - systems with various kinds of data will be changed or modernized but the service will stay the same and the user will not notice anything.
Each service fulfills a single, atomic business need. Each service is deployed independently and, as a whole, they constitute an implementation of business processes taking place in your company or organization. Note that the definition of what the business need is, again, specific to your own needs. In purely market-oriented integrations, this may mean, for instance, the opening of a bank account. In IT or OT automation, on the other hand, it may mean the reconfiguration of a specific device.
That services are atomic also means that they are discrete and that their functionality is finely grained. You will recognize whether a design goes in this direction if consider the names of the services for a moment. An atomic service will invariably use a short name consisting of a single verb and noun. For instance, "Create Customer Account", "Stop Firewall", "Conduct Feasibility Study", it is easy to see that we cannot break them down into smaller part, they are atomic.
At the same time, you will keep creating composite services that invoke other services; this is natural and as expected but you will not consider services such as "Create Customer Account and Set Up a SIM Card" as atomic ones because, in that form, they will not be very reusable, and a major part of why being atomic is important is that it promotes reusability. For instance, having separate services to create customer accounts, independently of setting up their SIM cards, is that one can without difficulty foresee situations when an account is created but a SIM card is purchased at a later time and, conversely, surely one customer account should be able to potentially have multiple SIM cards. Think of it as being similar to LEGO bricks where just a few basic shapes can form millions of interesting combinations.
The point about service naming conventions is well worth remembering because this lets you maintain a vocabulary that is common to both technical and business people. A technical person will understand that such naming is akin to the CRUD convention from the web programming world while a business person will find it easy to map the meaning to a specific business function within a broader business process.
With Zato, you use Python to focus on the business logic exclusively and the platform takes care of scalability, availability communications protocols, messaging, security or routing. This lets you concentrate only on what is the very core of systems integrations - making sure their services are interesting, reusable and atomic.
Python is the perfect choice for this job because it hits the sweet spot under several key headings:
It is a very high level language, with a syntax close to how grammar of various spoken languages works, which makes it easy to translate business requirements into implementation
It is a solid, mainstream and full-featured, real programming language rather than a domain-specific one which means that it offers a great degree of flexibility and choice in expressing their needs
It is difficult to find universities without Python courses. Most people entering the workforce already know Python, it is a new career language. In fact, it is becoming more and more difficult to find new talent who would not prefer to use Python.
Yet, one does not need to be a developer or a full-time programmer to use Python. In fact, most people who use Python are not programmers at all. They are specialists in other fields who also need to use a programming language to automate or integrate their work in a meaningful way.
Many Python users come from backgrounds in network and cybersecurity engineering - fields that naturally require a lot of automation using a real language that is convenient and easy to get started with
Many Python users are scientists with a background in AI, ML and data science, applying their domain-specific knowledge in processes that, by their very nature, require them to collect and integrate data from independent sources, which again leads to automation and integrations
Many Python users have a strong web programming background which means that it takes little effort to take a step further, towards automation and integrations. In turn, this means that it is easy to find good people for API projects.
Many Python users know multiple programming languages - this is very useful in the context of integration projects where one is typically faced with dozens of technologies, vendors or integration methods and techniques.
Lower maintenance costs - thanks to the language's unique design, Python programmers tend to produce code that is easy to read and understand. From the perspective of multi-year maintenance, reading and analyzing code, rather than writing it, is what most programmers do most of the time, making sense to use a language that makes it easy to carry out the most common tasks.
In short, Python can be construed as executable pseudo-code with many of its users already having roots in modern server-side programming so Zato, both from a technical and strategic perspective, is a natural choice for both simple and complex, sophisticated automation, integration and interoperability solutions as a platform built in the language and designed for Python people from day one.