About Apiro
What is Apiro? Now that's a great question! We call Apiro an Omni-Structured Data Management Platform. It's a phrase we coined specifically because it's not a common term and that reflects what we think is the quite unique nature of Apiro.
Here’s just one aspect where Apiro can assist an organization. And this is only one aspect - Apiro can do a LOT more than just this:
Before we present the scenario, let us preface by saying we risk having you associating Apiro in your mind as a 'legacy shell script management utility'. Not at all! When it comes to doing anything new with the funkiest, modern day web5.0, millenian, high tech awesomeness - We got you covered!
We present this example as a way to show that Apiro could be of use to you even if you have no intention of ever doing anything 'new' at all, ever again.
Even in the largest companies you would know as household names (including prominent financial institutions), you'd be surprised of the manner in which some data is sourced and processed. Most likely somewhere, there's a shell script running in that corner box, written by a long, departed intern from 2003, to provide a temporary solution for an urgent problem which would, in due time and when resource constraints permit, get a 'proper' solution, which even now is yet to come.
Here's the curious thing about that shell script - while not an ideal solution in many regards, it does the job. It does the job amazingly well! It's been running non-stop for decades. Do you know how much money companies pay for software that is explicitly designed to do that? When you think of it in that regard, it's the software bargain of the decade.
What's not ideal about it? Well, you'll likely only know when it didn't run reactively and when the downstream consumers of the system complain the new data isn’t where it's supposed to be. If it’s been running very reliably, paradoxically, it may be at a quite critical point where it's even realized THAT script exists to generate THAT data. Apiro can run the script in situ and notify you if it failed to run. It could potentially even run it on an arbitrary timed schedule in reaction to another event.
You may also not be aware of what the script is actually doing. Apiro could also open up that black box and potentially ingest the data file produced by the script, make it conveniently available for view to everyone via a convenient user interface, provide change auditing to indicate what changed and when, allow manual update with proper auditing of the data in cases where it's wrong or needs to be overwritten as well as augment and further process and distribute it to downstream consumers in formats and ways that were never envisaged when that script was first written all those years ago.
Now, if we could put this bow around intern script 2003, we would argue it's now a perfectly acceptable solution that, ceteris paribus, doesn’t need to be fixed at all. Let’s be serious - it's been 20 years. It'll likely be 20 more anyway.
If you, as a large company, were to gather the 1264 such adhoc 'temporary' solutions floating around and put them under Apiro management, you've leveraged quite a bit of advantage. At potentially no cost depending on your specific circumstances.
Yes, doing things right is the ideal situation - all those CD/CI Big Data Microservices Observable Blockchain Web3.0 Big Bang
Apiro is designed to live in the real world, this imperfect world.
Apiro, in a way, can be the best practice secure, available and observable facade front for your existing processes that the tech consultants are asking you to engage their 8 consultants to come in and do.
In a nutshell, Apiro puts management structure around and works with what you currently have while providing a pathway to evolve as needs and technologies change. It wraps existing in situ systems as well as provides a VERY powerful foundation in which to build new work.
We know this sounds somewhat nebulous - marketing fluff and puffery, if you will, but know well, that Apiro has been written by experienced enterprise developers who, through decades of experience, decided to write a tool that fills in the deficiencies of what they were currently using. It's a very eclectic Swiss Army knife of an application. Not just that, it's been refined and has gone through several iterations of refinement and evolution prior to its commercial general release - and when you see what it's capable of, we know that it will be apparent.
Apiro is capable of working with your data in whatever format it's currently in, whether that's freeform text such as from an email, a PDF document or a scanned JPEG image. It’s also capable of leveraging various AI agents (like LLMs such as GPT, LLaMA, etc.) to further assist in categorizing or augmenting the base dataset prior to pipeline processing (see the showcase for some cool examples with ChatGPT).
Apiro is capable of not only handling your data no matter what format it's currently in, it's also capable of getting ahold of your data, pretty much, no matter where it currently is. Like in the title or content text of an email, in an email attachment, in a zipped up file in an email attachment, in a database on your local disk, on the disk on another computer, on a file share, generated by a program on your computer, generated by a program on another computer, on a public website, on a private website that you have to log into, on a private website that you have to log into and go through a complex navigation process to get to, from a REST api service, on a message queue like kafka or pub/sub on amazon s3 or on an ftp or sftp server. No problem - you get the idea.
But that's just what comes in the box - it's all pluggable, so you can also define your own custom DataSources. DataSources (where we get the data) have their complementary concept of DataSinks (where we send the data), and by and large wherever you got it from, you can send it back via the same channel or define your own.
Although Apiro does have a GUI for end users - in terms of its development model, it's primarily been written by developers for developers. This was a MAJOR focus of ours. Apiro can be completely configured via configuration files using JSON and XML. The configuration files are sourced in GIT. This 'gitops' mode of operation confers great advantages in exactly the same way it does managing code. In dogfooding Apiro ourselves - this works wonders - believe us.
Since scriptability pervades Apiro, the configuration is or can be the code in a literal sense. Apiro runs an embedded version of Maven and can access java libraries as easily as you do in your own bespoke apps, though REST access is the preferred way to access local services if latency and speed are not critical.
Configuration can come from multiple git sources - and one way we will be expanding the capabilities of Apiro in real time is via making extension libraries available via publicly available GitHub repositories. Of course, we're not the only ones who can do this. Interested individuals may publish their own GIT configuration libraries to share flows or pipeline processes of special interest or novelty.
Industry groups, collaborating companies, municipalities and government departments can share common libraries to ease data sharing and integration with their customers, stakeholders and constituencies. A large company using Apiro could formulate configurations for their myriad smaller less tech savvy clients to ease interactions between the two. Smaller clients lacking tech sophistication, like potentially down mom and pop outfits, would most likely find the Community Version of Aprio acceptable and would benefit because this is free to use. In their case, a cloud install or subscription to Apiro Community Version would potentially be a great solution to quickly get up and running and if a benevolent third party provides the configuration, a quick and simple wizard style configuration process would be all that’s required.
Whoa! We've covered a lot and barely scratched the surface! Complex Orchestration Workflow, Data anonymization, MetaData tagging, Bi-temporal historical auditing, highly scalable Mulit-Master Sharded HA Clustering, Pervasive extensibility through the whole platform, etc. We could go on and on. But enough.
We've probably already opened up more questions in your mind than we've answered. We get it. Explaining exactly what Apiro is in terms of what’s out there is a difficult question to answer. This has not been an easy introduction to write.
However, seeing is believing - so rather than droning on any further, we recommend you install the freely available Community Version of the product bootstrapped with our sample demonstration config. Follow the instructions in the 'Getting Started' section of this guide and kick the tires yourself to decide if Apiro can be of assistance for yourself or your organization.
Also check out the 'Roadshow' and 'Scenarios' section of this guide for examples of what Apiro can do, including AI and ChatGPT integration.
If you don't need the enterprise features (check the feature matrix on the Apiro.com.au website), then you may enjoy the benefits of the Apiro Omni-Structured Data Management Platform at zero cost. It's our intent to keep the full featured (we CAN'T STAND crippleware) Community Version free forever.
It’s our way of giving back to the community that has provided the high-quality tooling that allowed us to invent Apiro in the first place. Standing on the shoulders of giants.
Enjoy!
The Apiro Team...