🥳Introduction to Frigg

Developing integrations as easy as `npm install`

How do we define "Integration"?

APIs are everywhere in software development. Application Programming Interfaces can be made for SDKs, hardware, internal modules, HTTP requests to external systems, and more.

Let's hone you in- Frigg is focused on building integrations between separate software systems, powered the majority of the time via HTTP APIs.

An integration, then, is the code that is used to "glue" these APIs together; an integration record is state managed by the software to keep track of which accounts and what settings a user desires.

At it's core, Frigg is intended to help developers build all types of integrations. And as we grow our footprint and community, we are undoubtedly going to see support added for enhanced features depending on your type of integration.

To start, however, our roadmap and framework is focused on one specific use case - software teams building native integrations to external systems for end-user integration. In a phrase: rapidly enabling technology partnerships.

Who is Frigg For... Internal Integrations? Powering your Software? Enabling your Users?

There are three potential use cases for Frigg that we currently use internally at Left Hook.

• Internal Business Process Automation- This is the kind where you get notifications from GitHub to your Slack account; or where you have a cron job that every week summarizes and creates a report in Google Sheets, and emails out to relevant audiences; really, anything to help your backoffice flow smoother. This is squarely in the realm of iPaaS tools today. The primary audience for these integrations are internal users of your organization.

• Product and Productized Service Automation- We view these as integrations that are powering your own software or service. Twilio integration to send text message alerts whenever a given event happens in your app. Webform piping to a database kicking off a drip campaign in your onboarding tool. Project completion kicking off an invoice to your clients with a summary of hours spent to date pulled from your time tracking software. There's a potential overlap with the first category, but it's most helpful to think of integrations to tools that eventually impact end users/customers of your software or service.

• End User Integration Enablement- These are the integrations powering technology partnerships. Allowing users to connect their Slack account to your app, or their HubSpot account, or their Salesforce account, or go on down the line. By doing so, they adopt prebuilt workflows and automations that you've product managed to optimize the "better together" experience.

Should you desire to use Frigg for each of these, we recommend creating 3 separate Frigg applications, as each one has a different user base, compute needs, and risk profile.

For now, it's critical to call out that Frigg is focused on the last bucket- End User Integration Enablement. Frigg is focused on powering your integration directory, and power the integrations your users choose to enable and configure.

Over time, there will be documentation and features focused on the other two buckets. So keep an eye on this space! But keep that in mind as you read on.

Frigg Explained to Partnership Leaders & Non-Technical People

The Frigg Integration Framework is a software development tool intended to help engineers build integrations faster.

While we all know that new "tech partnerships" unlock business opportunities, integration development is a complex, product-driven process performed by engineers and designers. Partnership leaders can't conjure new integrations into existence; product & engineering resources must be engaged and supported.

Given these dynamics, partnership leaders often seek external vendors and tools to get integrations built. This search brings them to Frigg and Left Hook.

Before you introduce Frigg to your engineering colleagues, partnership leaders should understand Frigg at a non-technical level. Our Non-Technical Overview Doc is intended to provide this context and support your internal advocacy for Frigg.

Meanwhile, Frigg's documentation site is targeted at engineers and product leaders who will need to understand the framework as a development tool.

If you're ready to introduce Frigg to your technical colleagues, share this documentation site. Our live demo site is also instructive to both technical and non-technical audiences as well.

Have questions? Let's connect!

Frigg: What's in a name?

• Frigg is Odin's wife in Norse mythology

• Goddess of marriage and partnerships

• She flies the earthly skies as a falcon

• She is known in folklore as the “weaver of clouds”

The Frigg Integration Framework powers integrations between software companies, the majority of which are in the cloud, speeding up time to live on tech partnerships.

Read more about Frigg on Wikipedia.

Frigg Explained to Developers

Simply put- Frigg is what you would build to rapidly develop integrations if you had unlimited resources and time. The added difference is the promise of Open Source-- not just your company, but a community of developers collaborating to solve the same core set of problems over and over again. Something you could never do internally.

The Frigg Framework is an opinionated set of development tools, modules, classes, and plugins built with modern software development teams in mind. The aim of the framework is to have you up and running out of the box with a flexible set of tools to help rapidly add integrations to your software that your end users can manage individually without any intervention.

The framework handles integration listing, authentication, and configuration "out of the box," built on a scalable serverless architecture with a growing library of prebuilt API Modules to greatly reduce time to wow. Along with the core "out of the box" features, the framework contains primitives to help address and flex to any use case.

A Note on Basic Architecture

A Frigg Application is predominantly a backend microservice, with an optional frontend. Most Frigg adopters already have an existing frontend UI built using a framework of their choice, or will bake integration UX into their product's core code. Frigg ships with a simple library of components to get you started quickly. See more details about frontend options here.

In the backend, Frigg is based on the serverless.com framework. This key piece of technology and the underlying compute/architecture under the hood provides a number of advantages:

• Infrastructure-as-Code- The need to manually configure resources on the host provider is greatly reduced

• Deployable to your favorite host- AWS, GCP, Azure, any a list of many more are available

• Horizontal Scalability

• Pay as you go

Navigating the Docs

We've got a lot to unpack! These docs should be your go-to resource for all things Frigg related. Over time, there will doubtless be other properties and places (courses?) where you'll get more deep dives into topics and example implementations, but for now, this is the place.

In general, there are five main areas of the docs

pageOverview

^ Here you'll find Quick Start tutorials and examples, along with deeper dive documentation on how to develop integrations with Frigg.

pageOverview

^ This is the main area where you'll find documentation around all Frigg concepts

pageContributing

^ Here's where we lay out how to get involved in contributing to the Frigg core project. And oh boy are we glad to have you!

pageOverview

^ Ah, the ever-expanding documentation section! At some point when we've reached critical mass (read: 1,000+ API Modules), "we're going to need a bigger boat". But for now, basic docs around any specific module live here.

pageContact

^ Yup, we all need support sometimes. When it comes to Frigg-related support, you've got a few options. Hit us up in those places! Or in person. Novel concept these days.

pageOverview

^ This is probably both the most exciting and most daunting part of the whole enterprise. So much possibility! We're using an external tool for now, so we're just linking out to there and giving a high level short-medium-long term road map on which you can anchor your expectations. Or if you want to sponsor pieces of the roadmap, you can greatly change its shape.

Contributing Developers

See CONTRIBUTING.md for details about getting started as a Frigg contributor.