How Does Instalink Work?

Instalink is a cloud based platform that provisions data processing services. The services are configured using the Instalink administration panel. A data flow is an instance of the service listening for an endpoint trigger (or running on a schedule) and then executing the prescribed processing actions.

Services Structure

Each service account on Instalink is assigned a subdomain. This subdomain can be configured in the account settings. The subdomain is where listening data flows, called Endpoints, can be accessed via standard HTTP protocols. For example, an account with the subdomain "puppies" would have all Endpoints listening at https://puppies.instalink.io

An account may have one or more project. A project is simply a collection of data flows. A project must exist before data flows can be created. Project settings apply to all data flows within the project.

The data processing service runs on provisioned instances called Processes. An account can have multiple Processes. Each process runs one data action at a time. Increasing the number of Processes on the account increases the number of data processing actions that can be run simultaneously. For example, an account with two processes can run two different instances of the data flows at the same time.

Actions

An action is an individual task that can be combined with other actions to form a data flow. Examples include tasks like transforming data, sending data, connecting to servers, calling databases, etc. Each action accepts input data from the previous action in the flow, potentially modifies the data, and then sends the data on to the next action in the flow. The data that gets passed from action to action is called Process Data.