Data integration company SnapLogic Inc. is stepping up its game for application developers with new capabilities designed to help automate DevOps processes.

The updates announced today include integration with GitHub and support for Mesosphere. They’re aimed at automating elements of continuous integration and continuous delivery, which is a development method focused on applying code changes more frequently and reliably.

SnapLogic sells a data integration platform that supports a library of more than 400 connectors, which it calls “Snaps,” that automate the process of connecting data from multiple sources into integrated software applications. With SnapLogic, developers can automate these connections via a simple drag-and-drop interface, reducing the time it would to do this from days or weeks to a matter of minutes at the most.

“You can put [Snaps] together like Lego pieces to define sophisticated tasks so you don’t have to write Java code,” SnapLogic Chief Scientist Greg Benson told SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio theCUBE during an interview at Flink Forward 2018 in April.

SnapLogic’s new platform updates are all about speeding up the time it takes to push out new code by providing better software testing capabilities, the company said.

To that end, the integration with GitHub, which serves as a repository for code, is important because it allows developers to host different versions of their work and gain visibility into the changes they make with each update.

“The integration allows users to host the pipelines they created in GitHub while maintaining version control so they can continue working on those pipelines later,” the company said.

SnapLogic is also adding support for Mesosphere, which is software based on the open-source Apache Mesos project. Apache Mesos is used to manage deployments of software containers, which are used to package applications in order to abstract them away from the underlying infrastructure so they can be built once and run on any operating system or hardware.

The company said that with Mesosphere, its users can now spin up Docker containers immediately without needing to manage them manually. This not only saves time but also reduces errors when moving services to container environments, it said.

The decision to support Mesosphere ahead of the better known and more popular Kubernetes project may raise some eyebrows, but Craig Stewart, SnapLogic’s vice president of product management, said it did so based on its own customers’ demands. Even so, the company is planning to add support for Kubernetes in a forthcoming release of its software.

“The company has a number of existing customers that already use Mesosphere in their environments and they wanted to have extra coordination and specific support,” Stewart said. “SnapLogic plans to support Kubernetes in forthcoming releases since it is one of the most popular choices for a container management platform. By implementing support for Kubernetes in the future, SnapLogic will ensure active support for use across the different clouds.”

Developers can also access new artificial intelligence capabilities designed to help automate their integration workflows. That’s possible through SnapLogic’s Integration Assistant, which now uses AI to recommend data connections when developers begin updating or building new apps. The company is also introducing a new Patterns Catalog of prebuilt, reusable integration pipelines that can be configured through a step-by-step wizard in the Enterprise Integration Cloud.

The AI integration should help SnapLogic along with its mission to facilitate development processes for non-developers, which is a goal that Chief Executive Gaurav Dhillon (pictured) outlined during a June interview on theCUBE. Dhillon revealed at the time his company was using AI both internally and externally with customers to enable more efficient predictive workflows, and today’s new release seems to be based on that work.

Here’s the full interview with Dhillon:

Despite these efforts, Stewart made it clear that SnapLogic is not trying to compete with low-code development platforms such as that offered by Appian Inc. or ServiceNow Inc. Instead, the company sees itself as being complementary to those kinds of offerings.

“Application development can be done in tools such as Appian, but data-integration and data-in-motion is SnapLogic’s specialty,” Stewart said.

Image: SiliconANGLE