Hosting Boomi in the Cloud

Click here to access the webinar recording.  Transcript below: 

Larry Cone (00:01):

Okay, we are live at our Boomi-focused webinar, Hosting Boomi in the Cloud, Business Drivers and Best Practices. So if that's not the webinar you're looking for, this is your chance to depart the plane as they say. But if you're interested in Boomi and some of the issues in running Boomi and why you might want to run in the cloud, you are in the right place. So we'll just wait a couple more minutes for folks to join. I can see folks are joining and then we will get started. So a little bit about our new platform.

(01:04):

This is the ON 24 webinar platform, brand new platform for me anyway, that the Boomi team is now using. It's got a lot of great functionality, polling questions, video. We're going to use all of that. This is our first try on ON 24, so should be fun. It should bring you, the viewer, an improved webinar experience. 

A couple of things to know, it's going to be recorded. You'll get a link to the recording. Do ask questions. So there is a Q and A module. Type your questions in there. We will take questions at the end of the webinar. We try to leave time for that. We're also going to use the survey feature. We're going to do a survey on what some of your challenges are around managing integration. That'll be in a minute. But first, let me welcome my panel. So I'm Larry Cone, CEO of Kitepipe. We do a lot of Boomi integration at Kitepipe. I'll talk about that in a minute, but I'd like to welcome two distinguished voices in this space. Mike Dulceak from BUNN. So Mike, say hi.

Mike Dulceak (02:33):

Hello. Good afternoon everybody, or good morning.

Larry Cone (02:36):

Okay, and Jake Brobst, the Solution Manager at Boomi. Jake, say hi.

Jake Brobst (02:45):

Yeah, thanks Larry. Hey everybody. Glad to be here.

Larry Cone (02:49):

Okay, we're going to be covering some important information for Boomi customers. Let's talk about what the problem is in integration. It's really about managing complexity these days. So at Kitepipe we do a lot of Boomi integration. We're a Boomi Platinum partner. 10 years on, we do a hundred Boomi projects a year. So we've really seen the transformation of Boomi from sort of a simple point-to-point tool to a really sophisticated platform for managing complex integrations, and that's what we do at Kitepipe. We help build and manage these integrations. 

So complexity is increasing because integration is important, whether it's HR, sales, procurement, omnichannel, you've got to do integration. Everyone has it - resource limitations, both funding and people, but business expectations continue to grow. So how can you do more with less in the integration space? So that's what we're going to be talking about. Before we get into that though, we'd like to hear from you. So here's our polling question.

What are the biggest pain points in your organization around integration, applications management? This is a multi-select. So please select the two or three or four issues that you see in your organization, and you'll have a couple minutes to do this. This should be popping up on your screen. So take a look at those and give us some feedback. It's always important to understand what's going on in your space. While you're looking at that, I'll talk about the agenda.

(04:52):

We're going to talk about some concepts around Boomi. Boomi is a very sophisticated integration platform and one of the real powers of it is the ability to run and manage that Boomi runtime. I'm going to talk about some of those Boomi concepts. Jake is going to help us with that. 

Going to get into a customer story. So Mike has a customer story: Move Boomi to the Cloud. We're going to talk about how and why they did that. Then we're going to talk about best practices. If you want to host Boomi in the cloud, there's some things you need to know and some skills you'll need to have. There's an offer in here too if you are not up to hosting Boomi in the cloud yourself. Kitepipe has a fully managed and supported offering. It's turnkey where you can run your Boomi runtime in the cloud.

(05:53):

We'll talk about that and then some overall benefits of that. We're interested in your questions. We've got experts on here to answer those questions and we'll talk about some next steps if you're ready to move Boomi to the cloud. Okay, so by now you should have answered your polling question. Let's talk a little bit about Boomi. Boomi is the leading cloud integration platform. Ideally, most of you on this call are Boomi customers or Boomi prospective customers because we're really focused on the Boomi integration platform in this webinar and how you can manage it better. Boomi is of course the leader in this space. I look at that number, 5 billion integrations a month. That's a lot. But then I think about some Kitepipe customers are running a hundred thousand documents a day. So I guess when you multiply that times it's 20,000 customers. It doesn't take long to get to 5 billion integrations a month. Really pretty remarkable.

So what can you do with Boomi? Well, you can do a lot. This is a map, an application map from one of our customers, Moderna. They shared this a couple years ago at Boomi World, and it's pretty effective at showing people what you can do with Boomi in terms of the different applications you can connect and the reasons you would connect them. So it's really the most powerful tool and I think that the Gartner agrees. So we've been watching Boomi and the Gartner Magic Quadrant I guess for nine different years.

(07:53):

Boomi really created this integration platform as a service category. Boomi was born in the cloud and I think still maintains a pretty substantial lead in terms of both feature set modules and customer base. So we're all about Boomi. Okay, so let's talk about the poll results. So you've looked at the poll question. Let's take a look at what you are sharing in terms of the poll results. Okay,

(08:38):

Pretty interesting. Okay, not quite what I expected. Let me just drain these a little bit. At Kitepipe, the one we see most often is supporting new applications in the cloud. That's typically why we engage with organizations because standing up a new platform or moving their ERP to the cloud, it's interesting, that wasn't stronger. Monitoring and management, that certainly can be a challenge. Configuring APIs, we think that actually external partners, so I'm surprised that that's relatively low. We think that's a big driver for companies as they build out Boomi connecting to external customers or business partners. Interesting, a lot of talk about master data management. So we do, we've done several separate webinars about master data management in Boomi. It is odd topic, pretty interesting to see that here. We at Kitepipe are, we think we're the leaders in implementing master data management in Boomi, so, so happy to talk about that as well with you at any point really. But today we're going to focus on specifically the runtime portion of the Boomi platform and why you might want to manage that in the cloud. So let's bring in Jake to talk about the Boomi platform. Jake, a little bit about yourself. What's your role at Boomi?

(10:26):

You appear to be on mute.

Jake Brobst (10:29):

Sorry about that. Thanks, Larry.

Larry Cone (10:31):

There you go.

Jake Brobst (10:32):

Hey everybody. Jake Brobst. Good to be here with you guys today. So I'm on the professional services team here at Boomi. I've been with the company for almost five years. I've been with this team the entire time supporting various different sales teams and basically the focus of my role, which is an Enterprise Solutions Manager, is to engage with our customers and figure out different solutions, mostly through our professional services to make sure that our customers are successful, whether that's an integration project or different managed services like Kitepipe's MCS program here, talking to our customers and learning what they're trying to do with the Boomi platform and finding the best way forward for them. So just to give the folks on the call, just a quick overview, this slide kind of highlights all the different key functions and features of the Boomi platform. So the Boomi iPaaS is, we're the leader for integration and automation, so not only on Boomi will you be able to connect your business applications and move data to where it needs to go.

(11:45):

It also has much more capabilities including doing B2B or EDI data synchronization through Master Data Hub, API management to create, publish and manage your own APIs, and we also have a workflow automation tool through Boomi Flow. The Boomi platform is secure, scalable, self-managing, and the different ways that we're able to host, whether that's on-prem in the Boomi cloud or public cloud or on private cloud. There's many different options and finding out what is the best solution for you, that's part of my job. And not limiting yourself to just the integration side. It's good to know that there aren't many different pieces of the puzzle that fit into everything that is Boomi.

Larry Cone (12:37):

Good. Well, so Jake, we're talking about the Boomi runtime. Talk about the different parts of Boomi and why the runtime's so important.

Jake Brobst (12:51):

Yeah, for sure. Just to kind of differentiate the difference between the Boomi platform and the Boomi runtime. The platform, that's what you see when you log in at platform.boomi.com. That's what you'll have access to and that's where you'll go in and configure and develop your integrations and publish them and move them into production or do testing. And once you are ready to actually test or run those integrations behind the scenes, there is a JVM or a Java virtual machine called the Boomi Atom, and that's, what Boomi has coined that as their distributor runtime, which is extremely powerful, lightweight virtual machine that does the actual processing of that code to perform those integrations, which is, it's independent, it's self-managing. You can manage it from the Boomi platform, it can run pretty much anywhere, whether it's just on a laptop or in the cloud. It's very flexible in where it's able to run. That's pretty much what the Boomi runtime is in a nutshell.

Larry Cone (14:01):

So that's what we're talking about today. We're talking about that Boomi runtime. It is, it's a powerful part of the Boomi offering. It's a real differentiator for Boomi and there are some options. So we're going to talk about running the Boomi runtime in the cloud, but Jake talk about these different options.

Jake Brobst (14:26):

Yeah, for sure. So yeah, there's lots of different ways and areas or places that you can run Boomi or host those runtimes. On-premise, that's hosting behind a DMZ on one of your local data centers to access any on-prem or legacy systems that may not have access to the cloud. That's certainly an option. Lots and lots of our customers have on-premise atoms or molecules or things like that. You can also choose to self-manage. You can have your Boomi runtime, your atom on your own servers, whether that's on the cloud or on-premise. You can choose to procure and manage that on your own. There is a hybrid model where you can do a mixture of both cloud and on-premise cloud to on-prem, a mixture of those topologies, which is use case dependent, and depending on what you're doing specifically, or you can choose to have somebody like Kitepipe do all of this for you and give you that zero footprint, white glove service where they can procure those servers for you. Get those tuned and scoped in size appropriately, host that for you on your own behalf on an ongoing basis. 

Larry Cone (15:53):

Good. So Jake, we are going to talk about some of these options, certainly the hosted model from Kitepipe, but there's a lot to know if you want to manage it yourself. We're going to dig into that, but I think it's important to talk about why you might want to move Boomi to the cloud. So at Kitepipe, we talk to customers every week who are thinking about this, and here are some of the reasons.

Are you moving off of an on-premise environment and you want to host Boomi in one of the public clouds? Are you running some of the more sophisticated tools in Boomi, the molecule or the APIs, but using Windows servers. For high performance, Windows servers aren't currently recommended. Are you expanding your API strategy or do you have external connections? Do you need 7x24 monitoring the support? Some customers are running in the Boomi cloud and they're getting upcharges because of the volume they're using in Boomi. So there are a number of different reasons why you might move Boomi to the cloud. Let's bring in Mike Dulceak. Mike has made this transition to move Boomi the cloud. So Mike, welcome. Why don't you talk a little bit about yourself and talk about Boomi?

Mike Dulceak (17:29):

Well, so hello everyone. Our journey really began back about a decade ago using Boomi, and it really has evolved over that timeframe. The company really started using it to integrate their new ERP system to their then service platform. And then over past decade it's evolved. Ultimately, we faced many of the same challenges that everybody listed in your survey. Resources, effective monitoring, not necessarily wanting to invest in the necessary infrastructure. We were running Boomi on premise at the time, and we found that it was a very, as we dove deeper into our analysis, we just found we had a lot of significant technical debt and so outdated operating systems and Boomi software. How do you maintain that? Who's the resources for it? We had a consolidated environment where our non-production and production Boomi instances were running on the same virtual machines, very limited. Our stability was challenging at times.

(18:43):

We were really, it was becoming a more and more integral application or solution within our company. And so we really needed to identify a path forward that was going to address all these concerns and provide an opportunity to potentially tap into additional expertise we have and still only have really a single resource developer resource that we consider an expert. And so trying to leverage that as a smaller organization and build relationships with organizations to help augment that is where we really tend to put our focus. And fortunately at the time, we had a good relationship with some of the folks here at Kitepipe, so we went into the same analysis. Most everybody else is probably looking at, right, do we do this ourselves? Do we do this in a managed service cloud type approach? And so we looked at a couple of options, including Boomi and yourselves and even doing it on premise and we decided to tap into our relationship that we had with Kitepipe.

Larry Cone (19:51):

Well good. And so good summary, Mike. And yeah, that relationship just does go back a while. I think it was probably, man, seven or eight years ago, I think I was working on a Boomi project at BUNN. So yeah, you're a good example of a company that's really expanding your use of Boomi. 

Mike Dulceak (20:17):

More and more each day. 

Larry Cone (20:25):

And really then running into some of the challenges about hosting Boomi. So we did write this up as a case study and it's actually really instructive and I think there was an event, I guess when you were modernizing that server, that's really where you had to decide what to do with Boomi.

Mike Dulceak (20:54):

Yeah, like I said, the technical debt, we were running Boomi on a Windows platform at the time, and obviously the preferred approach is obviously running in a Linux environment, and we really didn't have the skill sets at the time for that. 

(21:15):

We really used that as an opportunity to try and find how to best provide that. Because whenever we look at solutions like this, we always look to try to find the preferred path for that solution. I want to be where everybody else is running in case they're running into challenges and so forth. I want to make sure we've got the expertise to address it. So it was important to us to kind of find the right partnership that can help us address that challenge.

Larry Cone (21:46):

Great. And so people always want to talk about benefits or ROI. Anytime you're going to spend some money, you got to think about that. So we've called out a couple areas here from operations to security to support. What were the main benefit areas for you and BUNN?

Mike Dulceak (22:15):

To be honest, it's kind of a little bit of all of the above. So security is always at the forefront of everybody's mind today. So having the necessary expertise to help with that. We have some when it comes to the cloud, security skills and so forth, but it never hurts to tap into the additional resources. Operations and the ongoing management. Like I said, we were limited on our resources and we really wanted that person to be providing the value to the solution rather than the daily keep the lights on.

(22:50):

So that's obviously a key piece for us. Uptimes and stability, it's become a business critical solution for us. And so where we were versus where we are today, a much more stable platform performing today for us. We have proactive monitoring in place, which is critical. And most important to us, we have a fully tested DR program that we've gone through with this process and a great recovery time that we know is achievable because we've gone through it already. And then having the ability to tap into the extra expertise of the Boomi team and all your developer resources has just been really good for our purposes.

Larry Cone (23:40):

Yeah, because true, no one could be experts in everything these days, and a lot of IT organizations are focusing on those things that are close to their customer, close to their product, close to their delivery. Fortunately, you can hire integration experts to help you.

Mike Dulceak (23:59):

Yep, you're right. And you guys are a lot easier to retain than some employees, right?

Larry Cone (24:05):

It's true, it's true. The great resignation did get a lot of people moving in this direction. So at Kitepipe, we talk to folks every week who were thinking about this. A number of customers have moved Boomi to a hosted cloud environment. So here are some of those stories. So we just heard from Mike about BUNN. We have a health and wellness chain. Their problem was standing up sophisticated APIs to connect to their 180 locations, keeping that up 7x24. Logistics management firm - again, external connectivity. Scaling was a big issue for them. They're very peaky in terms of their load, needing 7x24 support. A SaaS software company who certainly has the team to do any of this themselves. They essentially decided to focus their resources on things closer to their customers and let the Kitepipe team handle this hosting.

(25:20):

And lastly, a higher education institution. For them, it's also resource limitations, skills, gaps, and the need for a high availability solution. So what if you're ready to set up Boomi in the cloud? So here's some of the basics, and we're going to talk about this layer cake in a little bit more detail, but you need to do a few things. You need to set up the infrastructure in one of the public clouds. Need to wire it with monitoring appropriately. A solution like this is really a good candidate for scripting for infrastructures code. It's fairly complex to set up to get it all right, and you want to make sure that you have a scripted version of that, so sets up both recovery should you need to do that and also maintenance as well. There are a lot of pieces and parts. So let's bring Jake back in to talk about what Boomi looks like in the cloud. So Jake, there's a lot going on here. Walk us through some of this.

Jake Brobst (26:35):

Yeah, sure. Larry. What we're looking at here, this is a pretty standard depiction of a virtual private cloud running a molecule set up as the Boomi runtime. So a lot of the different parts and components can be seen here. You have your Boomi API gateway at the front and center of that acting as your added layer of authentication for API calls coming in and out and who's allowed to access it and directing traffic. In the middle there, your external file share. It also has a load balancer in there as well, making sure that the different nodes that go into the molecule, the different pieces of the runtime aren't, one isn't being overly strained.

(27:33):

Basically the purpose of the molecule is to give that multiple node runtime engine that access to distribute loads evenly and also give you that high availability so that if one node goes down, you're not out of luck and you're able to maintain running integrations while the lead node is trying to get that other one back up and maintain that continuity and make sure everything's running smoothly. So it looks a little bit more complicated than it is, but that's why you have the experts on your side here to make sure everything's set up properly. Leveraging our best practices because Boomi and Kitepipe, we have the cloud experts on our side to leverage the shared knowledge and collective knowledge that we have of doing this for the past 10 plus years.

Larry Cone (28:27):

And it's darn stable when it's set up. I mean, here's the good news for anyone. Look at this. Boomi's been developing, maintaining, improving this very sophisticated runtime setup for years and years now, and it's dead solid. You do need to set it up properly though. So let's go through some tips and best practices. You can certainly do this yourself. It does require some skill sets, but here are just some of the tips and best practices. Certainly you need to set up multiple availability zones so you've got failover. Linux builds are the way to go, certainly for scaling. You do have to pay attention to shared storage latency. Those of you who know what that is, that's really important to Boomi performance. One of the trickiest things we find in setting these up is setting up the VPN to connect to your on-premise or your networked resources. Getting the routing and the resolution to work properly with the VPN can be challenging.

(29:49):

Some other things, setting up security and access is important. Scaling is important. Do script the build. Once you get it set up, you really don't want to have to do it manually again. So make sure you developed a script which can accurately reproduce the build for you. That also that's a management and a maintenance tool as well. And do include support. Do think about support. How are you going to monitor? What team is going to provide that support? What do you need? Do you need 7x24 business hours? So there's a lot to think about and there's a lot of skills as well. Do you have these skills in your organization? From Terraform skills for the scripting, understanding how to keep the Boomi runtime healthy, Linux server skills, and then that security configuration, particularly if you're external facing, have you configured the gateways and the access so that your security risk is minimized?

(31:16):

That really gets to our offer here. There's a lot to do if you're going to do this yourself. We have a fully managed Boomi hosting offer and it contains the important pieces that we've talked about. At the bottom in orange is the AWS infrastructure. So that's all of those pieces that Jake talked about, the runtimes, the load balancers, the gateways, the shared storage. On top of that is the Boomi molecule. Yes, this does run with your Boomi account, hosted by Kitepipe. So nothing changes in terms of how you look at and manage your Boomi account except where it's running. On top of that, we put a best of breed Datadog monitoring suite. So we're monitoring the infrastructure, monitoring Boomi and also the Boomi processes as well. And lastly, a Terraform scripting approach. What we found is for a quick, accurate build and to maintain that build, having a scripted build in the cloud is really key. We've set these up by hand, what we call stick built, and you can certainly do it. It's hard to replicate though, and if you need to enhance it, upgrade it, that can be a challenge.

So we're happy to handle any questions or comments you might have about what this architecture looks like. Let's talk about a couple next steps. You can certainly do this yourself. Lots of people do. You may however want some help in hosting Boomi. So a couple of next steps. Review the options that there are, I think four different sizing options here. Your Boomi team can help you help walk you through what those are. Please engage us Kitepipe for a detailed discovery session. We can talk about some of the differences and benefits of the different options. You'll certainly want to understand the pricing aspect of this and SLA, so we can certainly walk you through that. And consider the AWS marketplace. If you are an AWS customer, you can use some of your annual commit to purchasing, hosting through the AWS marketplace. So there's a lot of different options you have. And so let's wrap things up.

(34:19):

At a pretty high level. You might have some of these challenges. You might have to migrate Boomi from on-premise. You may be building out your Boomi environment and have external connections. API use cases scaling. The things you need to pay attention with was you're building out Boomi. Maybe you don't have the skills to deploy Boomi in the cloud. Security should certainly be a concern, if you're going to, particularly if you're going to be external facing, you need to have high levels of security. And support and monitoring. If you're running mission critical integrations, you want to make sure you've got a monitoring solution in place 7x24, and we can help you with that.

Okay, we have reached the end of our webinar content. Let's take a look at your questions. Okay, so this is where, let me see if I can find the Q and A panel. Okay, here's some good ones. So let's start with, okay, so maybe this was an early, a question early on. Can I host my own Boomi molecule in the cloud? Yes, you absolutely can. If you are either using AWS or Azure, you can install and manage Boomi in the cloud by yourself. Really, the challenges are skills challenges, focus challenge. Can you monitor, manage, and support it?

Mike, why don't you take this one? Why didn't you do your own hosting at BUNN? Why did you choose a provider like Kitepipe?

Mike Dulceak (36:23):

Well, in the beginning when we first started this engagement, we really had limited resources that were knowledgeable at the time with AWS, Azure and so forth. So we really wanted to work with our partner and have you guys help us through that. The timing of this, if we go back and when we started this whole journey, it was right around coming out of Covid. 

Larry Cone (36:46):

Yeah, right. Basically.

Mike Dulceak (36:48):

So everybody was dealing with some form of resource constraints and everything else.

Larry Cone (36:51):

Oh man.

Mike Dulceak (36:53):

Fortunately, you guys had the skill sets that were able to help us there.

Larry Cone (36:57):

Good, good. And Jake, here's one for you. So if I have a mix of on-prem and cloud endpoints, can I still use a hosted solution like Kitepipe's?

Jake Brobst (37:15):

Yeah, absolutely. Kitepipe will be able to go in and figure out the best architecture for you and kind of do that deep dive session and they can put your Boomi runtime on a local server, still have it communicate via to the cloud or vice versa or both. That mixture of topologies and our customer's unique use cases are definitely best handled by the experts that we have through our partnership here with Kitepipe and leveraging VPN.

Larry Cone (37:51):

Talk about the role of, so how does the VPN work? So if you've got on-premise databases, applications, and Boomi's then hosting in the cloud, how does that connection work?

Jake Brobst (38:08):

Yeah, you can have the VPN communicate behind your firewall and communicate to the runtimes behind the firewall through the VPN. And that can be a little bit resource intensive and skillset intensive. So again, that's something that's left to the experts, but yeah, that's certainly a capability that is possible.

Larry Cone (38:34):

Yeah, it's a challenge. I mean, and we ran into this with Mike and BUNN, it was how do you extend what's essentially a network topology, a network infrastructure out to a cloud connection? But yes, it's pretty well understood at this point and we can certainly help you set that up.

So here's a question about, okay, does a hosted Boomi runtime and account still work with our active directory authentication structure and single sign on? So yes, it does. So even though your Boomi runtime, the atom or molecule is running hosted in the cloud, it doesn't change your Boomi account at all. So whatever tools you're using to log in to control single sign-on the connected active directory or Okta, all of that access control you've got in place still works just the same. The only thing that's changed is where that Boomi runtime is running.

(39:55):

Okay, let's see if we can take one more here. Actually, a good question about latency. Any latency issues. So latency is important. We learned this pretty early on in setting these up. You've got to pay attention to the latency between the Boomi compute node, either the molecule node or the atom and the shared storage. Five years ago that was pretty expensive to do in AWS or Azure. Prices have come way down. So if you are configuring this, make sure you specify an engineer or low latency connection between that compute node and your storage.

Okay, and here's one. Once the architecture is in place and operational, how difficult is it to make changes to the existing architecture? For instance, if you need to increase the compute, the sizing? That's a really good question, and that really comes into the role of the scripting. So in our Terraform script, we can actually change that pretty dynamically. So what Terraform lets you do is it lets you change the capabilities or the specs of say a compute node, and then when you rerun that script, essentially it updates that compute node and can make it bigger. That's how we scale. You can spin up additional nodes. So the scripting architecture, Terraform is a critical part of changing and managing the infrastructure.

(41:51):

Okay. That's a bunch of questions and it looks like we're just about at time here. I want to thank my co-presenters, Jake and Mike. You guys are great. It's good to have both the Boomi expert viewpoint and the customer viewpoint in a discussion like this. So thanks so much.

Jake Brobst (42:21):

You're welcome. Thanks for that.

Larry Cone (42:24):

So follow up, best follow up is to talk to your Boomi rep. Kitepipe and Boomi work really closely together in these offerings, or feel free to call or email us directly. There's Chuck's email on the slide to talk to that. It's been great talking about this. We think that sooner or later, most Boomi customers will be interested in moving Boomi to a hosted cloud environment, either rolling their own or with a partner like Kitepipe. It just makes so much sense in terms of scalability, high availability. As you build out what you're doing with Boomi, that's where you're going to want to have Boomi.

Okay. Thank you all for attending. Looking forward to hearing from you or maybe seeing you at the newly announced Boomi World, Jake. I think that's happening next year in Denver, so a lot of my Boomi friends and customers, I look forward to seeing you there. Thanks.

Jake Brobst (43:44):

Definitely.

Mike Dulceak (43:45):

Thank you.

Larry Cone (43:47):

Bye.

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