What is an Integration Infrastructure Platform?

For years, integration platforms have tried to convince developers that product integrations could be solved with a single product. Whether it was embedded iPaaS or unified APIs — the promise was the same: build any integration use case with our product.

The reality? Developers end up getting burned as soon as they expand from their initial use cases (which are inevitable). This is because they don’t solve these three core challenges with integrations:

1. Integrations aren’t singular features - they’re made up of buckets of distinct use cases, each with their own requirements

2. One auth per integration - you cannot build parts of an integration in one platform, some parts in-house, and some on a second platform

3. Infinite abstractions - platforms cannot provide connectors and/or abstractions across every use case and do it well. Developers must have an escape hatch to build their own abstractions

That’s why we built the first and only integration infrastructure platform, designed to solve these three core challenges that are universal across any product’s integration strategy. But before we talk about what the core components to an integration infrastructure platform, let’s dive into these three challenges a bit more.

Integrations are product lines, not singular features

Integrations aren’t a monolith. Each use case within an integration will have unique requirements, and in general these fall into one of three buckets:

• High-volume ingestion/sync: Durable, large-scale pipelines (e.g. syncing millions of records from Salesforce or Google Drive).

• Real-time synchronous actions: Near-zero-latency requests (e.g. exposing a list of Salesforce contacts your app the moment a user clicks “Search”).

• Event-driven automations: Background automations and workflows across systems.

No single-purpose tool can optimize across all three. And yet, that’s exactly what existing solutions try to claim. The result: unexpected latency from job queues when trying to implement real-time use cases, or brittleness when trying to sync high volumes of data with an automation construct.

The Single Auth Problem

But even if you had the budget to buy multiple platforms (say, one for sync, another for workflows, another for actions), developers end up hitting a wall when it comes to authentication. In most products, integrations are comprised of multiple sub use cases, and functionality can also surface in different modules/features. However a user’s integration authentication can’t be shared if you’re using multiple integration platforms, since each have their own abstracted architecture for managing auth and refreshing tokens.

But you also can't ask a customer to connect the same integration multiple times. Not only does that create a disjointed product experience, downstream of that you can lose sight of rate limits, and can even force token expiry in some instances. Without unified auth, developers will end up running into more auth problems than these platforms can solve individually.

Infinite abstractions

The software ecosystem only continues to balloon, both in terms of the pure number of products that exist and can be integrated with, as well as the functionality each 3rd-party API supports. It simply isn’t possible for an integration platform to provide abstractions (connectors) for every single application, and cover the full breadth of endpoints every single 3rd-party API supports.

Developers cannot be limited by what an integration platform’s connector library supports and be beholden to their roadmap, otherwise they may be stuck waiting for a long time (or forced to build certain functionality in-house, which also may not be a path due to the single auth problem above).

The solution? Integration Infrastructure Platforms

Just as cloud infrastructure evolved into a category with clear primitives (compute, storage, networking), integration infrastructure requires its own foundations to solve the problems above in an elegant and comprehensive manner.

We built Paragon 2.0 around the following pillars:

1. Multi-tenancy & whitelabeled by design: Built for software products, not internal operations and workflows.

2. Managed authentication: One authentication layer, usable across every integration use case.

3. Platform and connector extensibility: Custom connectors and custom abstractions with full API/Webhook access.

4. Primitives designed for specific use cases: The platform must provide multiple modalities/architectures to cater to the different use case requirements you have, specifically:

   1. High volume sync

   2. Real-time responses

   3. Event-driven automations

5. Deep monitoring & observability: Developers need to have full visibility into all aspects of the platform - every webhook trigger, every token refresh, every request. Not just the most abstracted executions.

6. Developer-native: All changes must be version controlled in Git, rigorously tested in staging, before being released into production.

7. Deploy anywhere: Over the cloud, in your infrastructure, or even into your customers’ infra along with your customers.

Preparing for Emerging Use Cases

Getting those foundations built right is critical, as it enables use-case driven abstractions to be layered on top. With the emergence of AI agents comes new use cases for integrations. And these all fall neatly into the three primitives we shared above.

Integration Infrastructure Platforms must not only meet today’s requirements, but also provide thoughtful abstractions for tomorrow’s.

Paragon 2.0 = Integration Infrastructure

Paragon is the first and only platform built around this new category. Built on a developer-native, highly extensible backbone, fully deployable anywhere, and with products to support all three modalities.

• Managed Sync: Enable fully managed data & permissions ingestion pipelines

• ActionKit: Real-time, synchronous integration actions with use-case specific schema configurations

• Workflows: Bidirectional event-driven automations with custom integration logic

With Paragon, developers don’t have to choose between fragmented tools. They get one platform, built for all modalities, that still provides the depth and extensibility needed to ship production-grade integrations — today and as new use cases emerge.

To learn more about Paragon’s integration infrastructure platform and future vision, book a call here.