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Who’s who

Before diving into the concepts below, it helps to know the three actors in an Ampersand workflow:
  • You (the builder) — the software company using Ampersand to add integrations to your product.
  • Your customers — the businesses or users of your product who want it to connect to the SaaS tools they already use.
  • Providers — the third-party SaaS tools (Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, etc.) that your customers hold accounts with and that your product needs to read from or write to.
In short: you define one integration per provider in your amp.yaml, and each customer who connects their SaaS account through your product gets their own installation of that integration.

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Integration

An integration defines how your application will interact with a third party SaaS tool. You will have a single integration for all of your customers that are connecting your application with a particular SaaS product. For example, you might have an integration called mySalesforceIntegration. Salesforce is the provider that we are integrating with. You create an integration by defining it in a manifest file and then deploying it using the amp CLI. (See CLI Overview). An installation is specific to a single customer that sets up one of your integrations to connect with their SaaS instance. For example, mySalesforceIntegration might have 30 installations - one for each of your customers that have connected their Salesforce instance with your application.

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Installation

An installation is an instance of an integration, for a particular customer. It is created: An installation captures the following information:
  • the credentials for connecting to the customer’s SaaS instance. (Ampersand supports OAuth, Basic Auth, and API Key based authentication.) We call this the connection.
  • a customer’s preference for which objects and fields they want your application to read or write, and fields they’ve mapped. We call this the config.
For other terminology, refer to Terminology.