Exploring Workato

I recently had the opportunity to do some work with Workato, which bills itself as an integration and automation tool. It’s Ruby based (yay!) and 100% cloud based (as far as the core engine goes). A lot more could be said about the tool but I had several key takeaways.

Connector/library rule

In the middleware/integration world, connectors are often part of the marketing pitch. While they can add value, sometimes they are marketing without substance. One key way to figure out which is which is to ask the same questions you would of libraries:

  1. Who’s behind it? It is it well supported?

  2. How leaky is the layer of abstraction?

  3. In tandem with #2, is the abstraction on top of the underlying system significantly easier to deal with?

The connector concept in Workato is particularly valuable because you can use a subset of Ruby to implement them, rather than recipe logic.

PAAS

Platform as a service (PAAS) offerings cover a wide spectrum. Some tools like Mulesoft’s CloudHub expose the compute unit (e.g. an AWS EC2 VM) somewhat clearly on a per application basis. That can be more to manage but you also can understand resources and tuning a little more clearly. Workato is more of a shared environment. You don’t get to choose a VM or container size.

Taxonomy/concepts

As always, understanding taxonomy, concepts, and what problems they solve is key. Workato’s OPA (on-premise agent) is a prime example. At first glance, it just appears to be a network proxy agent that enables Workato’s cloud engine to work with local (non Internet) resources. It’s much more than that though. Workato OPA is really a Java extension point to the Workato Ruby engine. It can serve as a polyglot environment to utilize Java code/JMS implementations/etc. that otherwise would be inaccessible on the main Ruby engine. It also comes in handy for testing/mocking.

The same is true for recipes. Workato recipes are easy to build and they are also the primary licensing unit re: cost. At first glance, they may appear to be similar to Mulesoft vCores or Mulesoft applications. In reality though, functionality wise, a Workato recipe is more equivalent to a Mulesoft flow. Mulesoft applications require only 0.1 vCores and can have a huge number of flows as compared to what a Workato recipe can do. It’s important to ensure you are comparing apples to apples.

Brady Wied