I am currently implementing a software from scratch. And come across ballerina.io. It sounds like an interesting option, but I don't get in which scenarios it would be a better option than programming a Web Api in let's say C#.
Is it a good go-to-tool for complex integration scenarios, which are not easily set up in Kubernetes?
I have been working with Ballerina and also one of the development contributors for the ballerina language and its other platformic components. As of my knowledge and experience, Ballerina has many advantages over other programming languages.
Ballerina is a platform along with the language, libraries and tools which we can use for many use cases. The following are some of the major use cases where we can use Ballerina.
Integration Development: You can use Ballerina libraries to connect different systems, a variety of protocols and processes on any data. Use webhooks, Kafka, GraphQL, gRPC, AMQP, and email to subscribe to events from different sources. Also, use Ballerina service types for HTTP services, WebSockets, GraphQL, gRPC, and more to take your integration code, parameterize it and use it as a reusable integration.
https://ballerina.io/learn/enterprise-integration-patterns/
https://ballerina.io/learn/integration-tutorials/
For AI-related development: You can use Ballerina connectors (Stable Diffusion, OpenAI’s DALL-E, Whisper, Azure) to help with your AI applications. Here, use prompt engineering and calling APIs offered hosted LLMs to solve your AI business requirements.
https://ballerina.io/usecases/ai/
Native support for Healthcare: Ballerina offers its unique benefit as the only integration language built for healthcare. Ballerina provides its native support for healthcare standards like FHIR, HL7 and X12.
For more details check: https://ballerina.io/usecases/healthcare/
Ballerina itself is a very powerful data mapping language. So, the developers can use it very easily for healthcare products.
Ballerina is more flexible when it comes to API development. Ballerina has its VS Code plugin with a low-code editor which enables the developers to easily create APIs from high-level to low-level of abstraction.
Check ballerina.io for other use cases.
To answer your question,
Since Ballerina is a more developer-friendly language, it offers more maintainable code, clean syntax and supporting tools for different use cases. You will be able to easily handle different kinds of complex integrations easily. As far as I know, Ballerina surely reduces code-maintenance overhead. Also, Ballerina supports easy deployment in any resource.