Introducing INFACore: Discover How Informatica's Data Management Capabilities Empower Low-Code Developers to Build Robust Data Applications

This blog has been co-authored by Preetam Kumar.

A staggering 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day¹. As you can imagine, organizations are trying to leverage this high volume and veracity of data, which is generated from a variety of siloed data sources. But having a handle on it is a must to gain a competitive advantage and improve customer experience.

In recent times, low-code developers like data engineers and data scientists (who like to code using prebuilt frameworks and packages of popular programming languages such as Python, Java, etc.), play a key role in harnessing the value of data by building data-driven applications. Although they have several options (thanks to all the technology advancements) to build data applications, it’s not an easy task.

4 Key Data Management Challenges Low-Code Developers Face

1. Reusability

Because the functionality/technology of each application is different, reusing business logic with more than one application is a common data management challenge. This means there are multiple implementations of the same logic across different applications. Although developers try to implement modularized programming models, the reusability is very limited to only the application.

2. Rapid Prototyping

Data teams want to be able to experiment on different hypothesis and build or productionize robust data-driven applications with minimal code and iterations. But the veracity of siloed data sources and different programming methodologies makes it difficult to implement rapid data prototyping. The result? Spending an inordinate amount of time building applications. Unfortunately, developers, such as data engineers, spend most of their time on repetitive and trivial tasks, and not on innovative projects for data management.

Some developers try context switching, which is a form of multitasking that requires them to switch between applications. Unfortunately, frequent context switching reduces productivity, decreases creativity and impacts the quality of work. Developers often do context switching to carry out some basic data management tasks that lead to lower productivity.

3. Maintenance and Support

One of the main challenges faced by developers is to create future-proof applications. Given a variety of choices for performing the same task, developers often get misguided and use substandard packages. This can lead to significant maintenance overheads and rework. Often security vulnerabilities, performance issues, limited configuration options, etc. produce big hurdles in using the application at scale in production.

4. Unified Governance and Controls

Given the complexities of the data ecosystems, it’s important to ensure that all the data applications have proper governance and controls in place. Even a minor glitch may lead to severe repercussions. Developers need to spend a lot of precious time trying to ensure these nonfunctional requirements are implemented properly.

What Low-Code Developers Need to Build Robust Data Applications

Below are the some of the key capabilities that developers need to build modern data applications:

• Abstraction of complexities and out-of-the-box options to provide flexibility
• Seamless integration with existing programs so there’s no need for context switching
• Ease of use with no learning curve with maximum reusability and collaboration
• Future-proofed, built-in support for nonfunctional aspects such as security, performance, scalability, extensibility version control, build/migration options, etc.

Empower Low-Code Developers With INFACORE’s Intelligent Headless Data Management

In the cloud, the only thing you own is your data. Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ (IDMC) is designed to help businesses innovate with their data on virtually any platform, cloud, multi-cloud, distributed cloud and multi-hybrid. This comprehensive, cloud-native and AI-powered platform is the one-stop destination for data-driven business transformation.

To further help the low-code developer community, Informatica has abstracted the complexities and simplified data management with its innovations to create Informatica INFACore. A service of IDMC, INFACore enables developers to use their favorite programming language or IDE, without any context switching.

INFACore is the industry’s first simple, open, extensible and embeddable intelligent headless data management component of IDMC. It radically simplifies the development and maintenance of complex data pipelines and data management tasks, turning thousands of lines of code into a single INFACore function. INFACore also:

• Provides complete flexibility to integrate with any third-party application, built using virtually any programming language
• Provides all the innovations of IDMC for developers to use within their programming interfaces
• Increases developer productivity with zero maintenance and maximum reusability
• Is future-proof, scalable, cost-optimized and agnostic to any cloud ecosystem, IDE and programming language

INFACore provides open standards for ecosystem integration. It provides software development kits (SDKs) for popular programming languages and plug-ins for popular IDEs to build and extend custom solutions by leveraging IDMC’s capabilities. This enables customers and partners to innovate faster to deliver holistic solutions with tangible benefits. With INFACore, IDMC satisfies virtually every data management need.

Let’s review some analogies of common open, extensible and embeddable data management.

How INFACore Works: Real-World Analogies

You may have heard about Grammarly, a cloud-based typing assistant that reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity and engagement. Grammarly’s writing tools are designed to work where you do — on your phone or laptop, in your web browser or on your editors. You can add the Grammarly extension to your browser/editors and directly access Grammarly’s writing suggestions from any application, such as Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, without any context switching or learning curve.

Like Grammarly, the INFACore plug-in radically simplifies and enhances developer productivity by helping them use IDMC’s data management capabilities within their development workspaces without any context switching.

Another analogy is Google maps, a widely used digital navigation tool. Instead of building home grown maps solutions, many delivery and taxi applications use Google maps to enhance their customer experience.

Similarly, building custom data management solutions is not productive for businesses. Enterprises want to leverage the data management capabilities from the platform and focus on high-value initiatives like advanced analytics, data science and AI.

FAQs for INFACore

Below are answers to some of the most asked questions regarding INFACore:

1. What features and functionalities will be available in INFACore?
   The initial version will have data integration capabilities such as:
   • Native connectivity to various data sources
   • Advanced transformations
   • CLAIRE® (our AI engine) capabilities, such as Intelligent Structure Discovery (ISD)


2. Is INFACore a new product?
   

INFACore is a new service of IDMC. It exposes existing IDMC capabilities to low-code developer personas to be consumed within their IDE.

3. What plug-ins and SDKs will be available in INFACore?

The initial version of INFACore will have an SDK for Python. It will also have a plug-in for the JupyterLab notebook interface. The SDKs for other programming languages, like Java and Scala plug-ins for Eclipse IDE, and browser plug-ins are planned for later versions.

4. Can I use INFACore SDK alone, without a plug-in?

Yes. The plug-in is just a productivity tool. You can call INFACore functions directly within the program after importing the dependent libraries/packages.

See INFACore in Action

Interested in learning more about INFACore? Ready to improve developer productivity and optimize cost? Just complete this form to see a preview of INFACore in action.

^{1 https://seedscientific.com/how-much-data-is-created-every-day/}