Storyblok, one of the leading CMS players in the SaaS market is using Integration.app to scale their integration infrastructure

Goals

• Cut down time to learn individual APIs and how to integrate with them
• Find a scalable layer and alternative to repeatable custom code work for integrations

Highlights

• Storyblok built a custom connector with Algolia in just a few hours instead of weeks.
• Time to ship a new integration is now 1 day vs 2 weeks before.
• Storyblok’s engineers now only focus on building integrations' business logic, while the back-end is handled by Integration.app.

Company Overview

Founded: 2017

Industry: CMS / SaaS

Number of employees: 245

Location: Remote / Austria

Website: https://www.storyblok.com/

Description

• Storyblok is a Headless Content Management System (CMS) platform that provides highly customizable content blocks and visual editing tools, designed both for technical and non-technical users like marketers to manage content that appears across websites, apps and other digital interfaces for education, commerce, gaming and other kinds of publishers.
• The company is gearing as a leader in the CMS space having raised $138m to date, including a series C funding round from Brighton Park Capital and other leading VCs such as HV Capital, Mubadala Capital, 3VC, and Firstminute capital.
• 200,000+ developers and marketers from leading brands such as Adidas, T-Mobile, Renault, and Oatly use Storyblok to consolidate content and create better digital experiences across all channels

Problem

Storyblok is on a path to accelerate connectivity with a range of business applications from ecommerce to collaboration & productivity tools. As a modern and leading CMS, they need to expand and become a powerhouse in terms of working with other SaaS products.

Given their ambition to integrate with dozens of new apps this year, they knew they had to build a good infrastructure layer to handle building and maintaining customer-facing integrations.

The buy vs build was a clear decision for them. It would take at least 6 months to arrive at a robust integration infrastructure in-house, eating lots of engineering time. Additionally, every new integration would take at least 2 weeks to ship and get to production. They knew they had to cut down this time and work and find a suitable and flexible 3rd party solution that could accelerate integration development.

The main players they looked at were Tray.io, Nango and Integration.app. As part of their evaluation, it was important that the provider will be able to handle the whole infrastructure of mapping, managing authentication and storing data specific per customer efficiently, so the Storyblok engineers could focus only on the business logic. It all sounds nice and easy but the devil is in the detail.

Aiming to solve the problem came down to some specific details: easy-to-use data schemas and running background jobs that can run for longer times to fetch stories from Storyblok. However none of the alternatives had baked-in functionality for efficiently defining data schemas across multiple integrations and no limitations on time-out to run background jobs, besides Integration.app

Lastly, the open-source aspect for an integration provider was initially appealing. Get to keep everything in their own Git repo, version control it and have flexibility on deployment. The reality was different, as building integrations would still be time-intensive where only the auth layer is provided for a vast majority of core apps, you still need to write a lot of custom code.

Why Integration.app?

As Storyblok started to look for a reliable integration infrastructure provider, they were optimising for a few key aspects:

• Flexbile visual editor: running actions or flows needed to be easy to understand and simple to navigate
• Abstraction layer for authentication & working with structured & unstructured data: so they can focus only on business logic
• Configurability: bake-in their own code, customise per customer or per SaaS app
• Storing data per customer for integrations: use a configurable schema to set up and store metadata instead of building their own database
• Reactive Support: other vendors took weeks to reply, with Integration.app it was minutes

During his evaluation process, their Lead Engineer Eunjae mentioned:

• "It took 30 minutes to understand the concepts and how Integration.app works. Once I got the hang of it, I recorded videos and trained 5 engineers on the team how to use it. It’s a really powerful tool, and the scope is unmatched."

Implementation with Integration.app

Building the Algolia Search integration from scratch

None of the integration products evaluated by Storyblok had pre-built Algolia connector, so the part of the evaluation was to build Algolia integration from scratch: first connector, then integration flows for pushing stories to Algolia.

Integration.app connector builder stood out as being the most flexible and feature-rich. While all other products had custom connectors as a stopgap measure, integration.app provides the same connector tooling as used internally for creating pre-built connectors. Battle-tested on hundreds of the most complex APIs, this connector builder lets you quickly build and customize any aspect of your integration.

Display Shopify product data on websites built with Storyblok

The Shopify integration posed its own set of challenges:

• The authentication mechanism required by Shopify was very non-standard. It needs to originate from the Shopify app store, go through Storyblok app, integration platform, and then back to Storyblok. Integration.app was the only product that could handle this complexity using custom callback URL and related functionality.
• Shopify API is built on GraphQL, and Storyblok needed to customize API requests, which is not supported by most integration platforms. Integration.app actions handled this use case extremely well.

Benefits for Storyblok

Storyblok found their ideal match eventually and they are starting to see increasing benefits to their previous setups:

• Integration speed - They were able to get integrations up and running much faster than expected.
• Reduced backend tasks: Given a lot of the backend infrastructure is handled by the platform, their engineers are free to focus on building better business logic
• Time to market - They can ship features faster without redoing integrations each time.

What's Next?

Since partnering with Integration.app, 10 Storyblok engineers have learned how to use the platform and are working on new integrations, like Microsoft Teams & many others.

Sebastian, Storyblok’s VP of Engineering, shared:

This short story emphasises many aspects of our growing presence in the market. More and more established companies are starting to use Integration.app as their main integration infrastructure provider. We are able to serve the largest scope of integration use cases in SaaS and accelerate our path to become the connectivity layer of the SaaS world.

For more details about them and how their integrations look like in production, feel free to check out their website: https://storyblok.com/