Integration Lifecycle Management (ILM) overview

Integration Lifecycle Management features help you build and manage your integration's software development lifecycle by supporting version control, release management, and git-style features to push, merge and commit changes.

Contents

• Simplify lifecycle management with revisions
  •  Integration Lifecycle Management overview
    • Benefits
    • Guidelines
    • Examples - Approaches for setup
  • Integration Lifecycle terminology
  • Work with revisions
• Manage lifecycle revisions

Benefits

Integration lifecycle management:

• Helps you to build and test your integrations in a continuous improvement cycle.
• Helps you adhere to good practices of monitoring and managing changes while building your integrations collaboratively.
• Supports a quick and flexible approach to building integrations. You can clone an integration any number of times in the production or sandbox environment, give any number of individual users access to any of the clones, make and test changes, then pull changes in any of the clones into the production integration.
• Reduces the risks associated with making changes to mission-critical integrations. integrator.io implicitly maintains revisions, and you can always revert to a previous revision at any time.

Guidelines

You can consider these guidelines when planning your integration management.

• Build or update an integration, preferably in sandbox environment.
• Create a clone to test changes to an integration in a sandbox environment. If you don’t require or have a sandbox environment, create a clone in the production environment. Note that when developing large features that have different teams using different development/testing clones, it’s good to establish guidelines for pulling and merging changes so that teams work well together.
• Create snapshots as a backup. For example, when you have to fix a critical bug quickly, you might want to build and test the fix on the integration in the production environment itself. Snapshots help you to quickly revert to a stable state if you run into an issue.
• Create a clear access policy for effective collaboration. To understand access and permissions, see Manage account and integration permissions.

Approaches for setup

Here are some examples of approaches and workflows to set up and manage your integration.

Create backups

• Create an integration and manage access level.
• Create a snapshot.
• Always take snapshots before making changes to critical integrations or set an automated backup frequency using the APIs.
• Audit revision changes when required.

Collaborative development to manage integration changes

• Create an integration and manage access level.
• Create a clone.
• Make changes in one of the integrations.
• Create a pull.
• Review changes with the difference (diff) screen.
• Merge changes.
• Audit revision changes when required.

Note: Snapshots are automatically created when changes are merged. This allows users to revert before or after the changes were merged.

Note: There are no predefined integration lifecycle workflows, and these examples are merely for guidance. You have to create an integration lifecycle routine based on your company's system development process requirements.