Citizen Integrator Solution?

[brettdorsey]

Hello all,

We’re in the process of on-boarding our first Citizen Integrator in the SnapLogic Platform. We’ve previously federated the development of production integrations to LOB developers, but the Citizen Integrator has a different set of requirements and I’d like to start a discussion as to how best to accomplish this.

Below is the criteria we’re trying to meet:

• Enable power users of our Marketing team to do simple, low risk, integrations without involving IT
• Allow the Marketing user to leverage some of our existing shared pipelines and patterns
• Isolate the resources the Marketing team enough that it will not affect our production integration performance (new users could do some crazy stuff)
• Allow access to specific sets of production data, but not all shared accounts.
• They will not have the concept of dev, qa, and production, as digging through production data is their world.

We’re considering a few options, each with drawbacks and advantages…

We could make a new Project Space, as our current development teams have their own project spaces. This gives the marketing team access to shared assets, but puts them into the same production environment as mission critical integrations.

We could perhaps create an entire new org. This would keep them isolated and I think we could assign a node specifically to that node to manage resources. But they’re not able to see shared objects unless we manually move them over. I’m also not sure if there is a cost involved here.

I’d love to hear from anyone else that has already gone down this road. What methods did you try? What worked, and what didn’t?

Thanks in advance!
Brett

[shodge]

In general, you should be able to keep the new users on the same org; in their project space they can be given their own Snaplex (and only access to that Snaplex). This would probably be the best trade-off between convenience and security. I’ll let others who do this more often chime in.

Shayne

[vthatikonda]

One of the clients is trying to enable Citizen Integrations with following constraints :

• Business users can integrate anything. IT does not want any constraints
• All outbound data end points should be constantly monitored against an approval list

[ncrouch]

My recommendation on this generally depends on how your existing dev/qa/production environments are set up.

Shayne is correct - you can separate the processing infrastructure by Project Space, as well as separating access to data. However, it can become complex to manage the development lifecycle if you have some spaces that do need management, some that don’t need management, some that need a little management (and so on) all in the same org. Possible, but complex.

It might be just plain simpler to put them in their own org. That will let you keep your citizen integrators completely separate from your fully productionised integrations and minimise the risk of, for example, pushing a integration through your development pipeline that doesn’t meet your standards. It will also give you more power to set up your project spaces so that you can have, again as an example, a structure like this:

- Department
    - Staff Member
    - Staff Member 2
    - Staff Member 3
- Department 2 
- etc. etc.

[tlui]

I think I would prefer the separate Org option. The main burden is then manually moving things you want to share from one place to the other. Given that you are okay with moving things, I guess my next question would be if you foresee other departments requiring access and integration at a future point. If marketing is the only one then standing up one other org and switching from one to the other shouldn’t be too painful. However, you don’t want this to always be a n+1 problem and have org proliferation.

People also generally don’t like to touch things once in production and if in the same org, you would need to probably move your Snaplexes from org>shared to org>Production>shared so that marketing would not be able to run pipelines on the production Snaplex for the single-org model.

Those are my main thoughts. HTH!
-Tim