Integration Architecture for tomorrow's enterprises
Come to the world of Google, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. You must have also heard buzzwords personalization, gamification, SOA, simplicity and security. Suddenly integration architecture comes to the forefront for business transformation. Having looked at large enterprises and how their integration efforts have evolved in the last 10 years or so, I can foresee integration moving towards service-oriented and cloud-based architecture. Integration architecture acquires new vision and discipline.
Enterprise architects are proposing lighter-weight infrastructure to support more complex integration projects. New services are being influenced by API landscape which is increasingly REST-based, service oriented and mobile enabled. So most important integration principles that should be adopted for new transformations:
Simplicity in ESB designs
An enterprise service bus (ESB) is a key enabler for service-oriented architecture (SOA). ESBs have really increased in popularity over the years, along with new modules developed by vendors for various problems. There are now multiple solutions for business optimization, data governance, business process management, service oriented architecture, orchestration and cloud enablement. But many times ESB tools are being implemented for solving wrong problems or in a flawed manner. For example, when ESB starts processing application logic, it gets bad name. Functionality of application server will never be complemented by ESB solution/infrastructure. In the crux, special attention should be paid to keep the solution simple and leverage modules that solve the underlying problems. This will also ensure that your ESB passes underlying benchmarks for performance and security.
Appropriate use of ESB infrastructure
Middle tier (the ESB) provides routing and mediation, of messages passed between service requesters (consumers) and service providers. An ESB provides way to decouple requester view of service, from the implementation of a service. An ESB also provides decoupling the business view of a solution from the technical service interactions. So, most appropriate use of for ESB will be to align long term strategic goals to underlying implementation. Best use case scanarios for ESB then are for message routing, master data management, translation and achieving decoupling. Implementing appropriate modules for solving underlying problems are crucial to using the tool correctly. Otherwise, enterprises will have an ESB infrastructure that can be costly and difficult to maintain. I just correlate this to tremendous IT waste I have seen due lack of foresight or vision in selection, design and overall principles.
Governance for integration architecture
Pay special attention to finalize governance in a global organization. REST patterns have been found to be easier to understand and provide underlying governance model which is developer friendly. REST use has been adopted by web giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. An effort must be made to provide proper governance for your integration architecture efforts. If you are working in a B2B environment, your overall API pattern must correlate with availability of protocols from your vendors such as SOAP or REST.
Gamification for enterprise integration efforts
Games and game technologies now increasingly extend their traditional boundaries, as evidenced by the growth of serious and pervasive games. Evident by success of location-based services such as Foursquare, this design approach has rapidly gained traction in interaction design and digital marketing. So today some enterprise application experts are also adopting gamification for integration of technologies such as Big Data and Cloud. Development shops are creating game concepts to keep development community engaged and overcome major hurdles to integration architecture success.
