Zato is an open source Python-based middleware platform and backend application server. It was designed as an agile ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) aimed at building systems of systems either on-premise or in the cloud. Zato provides SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), REST (Representational State Transfer), APIs and cloud integration, as well as back-end services exposure to front-end clients.
Zato is a powerful and scalable platform that not only assists in building and orchestrating integration services, but also enhances intercommunication across applications and data sources. It can keep in order all technical solutions your business uses and open way for new opportunities and processes. Usage of a wide range of connectors, data formats and protocols allows Zato to avoid restricting architectural style or enforcing any other limitations.
Zato comes with a powerful browser-based GUI that is easy to understand and use for newcomers; fast and powerful to work with for experienced users. GUI gives users an immediate insight into all the events and transactions activity on the integration platform and enables rapid management of resources. Other ways to access Zato is via an API or command line.
The main advantage of Zato is increased productivity that simplifies production operations and enables Zato-based solutions to achieve faster time to market. High productivity is obtained due to several peculiarities of the platform’s design. Zato is implemented in the Python programming language that heavily defeats almost any other language in comparison based purely on productivity.
Zato servers are built on top of gevent and gunicorn that handle incoming traffic using asynchronous notification libraries so skillfully that developers can access, design, and develop their projects without additional concerns. Servers are contained in a cluster that keeps configuration in an SQL database (for static configuration shared between servers) and Redis (read-only, for statistics or frequently updated data). To avoid server restarts HAProxy-based load balancer, hot-deployment and hot-reconfiguration can be used.
Among protocols, industry standards and data formats Zato supports are HTTP, REST, JSON, SOAP, AMQP, JMS WebSphere MQ, ZeroMQ, Redis, SQL, Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift, Odoo/OpenERP, Cassandra CQL, SMTP, IMAP, FTP, Solr, ElasticSearch, publish/subscribe, integration patterns, RBAC, security, statistics, job scheduler, and more.
Other advantage of Zato is its support of concepts like loose coupling and reusability of components. Its long-term aim is to automate and re-use as many techniques as possible. A couple of clicks will be enough to access any sort of information or perform any integration task. No more constant reimplementation of the same steps. Moreover, Zato promotes minimization of the interference of components on each other, and server-side objects. Users can easily update component, reconfigure them on fly or reuse in other contexts without influencing others.
Major Zato’s features also include Bash completion, installation under Docker, framework for API testing, rc.d scripts and systemd integration, distributed locks, additional security mechanisms (such as RBAC , SSL/TLS, OAuth, API Keys, XPath-based, NTLM, Amazon AWS), and much more. Visit zato.io website to get more detailed information.