Integration as a Service the future of real-time integration

The technology landscape and people interacting with technology is changing rapidly. With this change, the business is required to integrate with new systems more often, putting more stress on the IT to prepare the systems for real-time integrations.

 Here are some of the modern Integration architecture principles, to support such high demand in integrations.

Soap vs. Rest

 You all know this discussion about SOAP vs. REST is been going on in many enterprises. Initially many large organizations adopted SOAP web services just to enable an SOA architecture, now the change in direction to REST is challenging the legacy IT system to adapt quickly.

Now with mobile technology taking over the consumer market, many technology vendors have adopted REST, and many even argue that SOAP be a dying technology for various reasons.

 Nowadays many modern apps and cloud-based systems are built solely on REST without giving an option for SOAP based integrations. This aggressive adoption to rest is pushing the SOAP out even further.

 The point I am trying to make is, as long as the mobile technology grow, the demand for REST will continue to increase and making SOAP less sought out technology for future integrations.

 Shared Memory cache.

 With the growth of internet of things, the demand for integrating with these new systems and devices also grows exponentially. These type of modern integration creates an enormous demand to integrate in real time by aggregating and correlating the data to enable quick application integration.

 The ideal solutions to achieve these real-time integrations is by caching the data in memory. Global caching architecture enables a quick staging area for real time reference data or any stateful business transactions.

 If you are not aware the term global caching, it is used when the cache is available between multiple instances, to share the same data across the clustered environments. Enabling high-performance gains and cost reduction in system resources.

 Zero downtime deployment.

 The title itself says it all. Imagine the value it would add to IT if there is no downtime during deployment, especially if the implementation requires to talk with two different systems.

 The concept is simple, whenever there is a significant deployment you will spin up an entirely new instance of the platform with the latest changes and deploy it to run in parallel with the existing instance. Then gradually route the traffic to the new one and once the new features are tested enough then gracefully shut down the old instance.

 When the integration platform supports this type of deployment, that gives the enterprise a massive advantage in business. There is no downtime, which enable the IT ops to take more risks and ship the products much faster.

 Integrated repository for versioning the code

 One of the fundamental challenges, still prevailing in many organisations. Managing and maintaining the code. Furthermore managing the runtime code, keeping in sync with compile time code with runtime code is always a humongous task.

Although there are so many tools and best practises available in the market, still when the code is managed outside the platform it is still a massive overhead. Taking the code in and out of the product, maintaining the right versioning strategy and not to mention the high complexity involved in deployment automation.

 The latest integration technology toolset comes with these features build in. That means the code is packaged in a native format inside the tool itself. Moreover, the code is ready for versioning and deployment as needed, and the best part is we can revert the code to any version during runtime without much manual intervention.

 Better connectors to modern systems

 As the technology landscape grows from all possible directions and more SAAS based products launched every day. Businesses are moving quickly to take advantage over these new SAAS products.

Moreover, when they turn around to IT for integration, that is when they see the resistance. The legacy system is not ready for integration yet, by the time the team prepares their integration the SAAS product might have changed directions and the business loses the investment.

 The only way to solve this problem is when there are adapters to connect with the SAAS product readily. It’s also practically impossible to come up with adapters for every system. However, if the adapter kit could contain the most common players in the market, along with the generic protocol adapters, that's a win for IT and business. It will also enable the business to take the right decision before adapting to new SAAS products, based on the availability of adapters.

 Hosting and scaling

 With the growth of cloud infrastructure, hosting and scaling are becoming easier and cheaper day by day. Having to manage and maintain an in-house data center is the challenge that business is posting on IT, and the shift is complex because of the legacy system running in those data centers.

So the requirement to integrate with the in-house applications with the cloud infrastructure is rapidly growing. The problem with cloud integration is scaling, applications hosted in the cloud can scale quickly and easily, but the in-house application might not have that scaling advantage. Talking between these two types of systems, the integration layer should scale to the cloud system level else the integration will indeed fail.

 With the above use case, the modern integrations should consider the scaling in their architecture decisions.

 It is even easier to adapt if the integration platform comes with a cloud hosting support without limiting any features. Such kind of products not only reduces the cost of IT infrastructure but also provides a flexible scaling architecture.

 Integrating with Business process in mind

 The gap between business and technology is diminishing faster. The technology is becoming a vital part of the business process. We know a well-defined business process will help design a better technology product to support your business. This is no different for integration process as well.

Many integration architects look at business processes and integration processes as two separate entities. However, the future of integration is tying these two together; business process will define how the integration flows between systems. Integrating systems, applications. Process, and data will be all in one integration layer.

 At the same time getting too much involved in the business process area could put much strain in the integration layer. This is where establishing best practises and patterns would help shape up the best possible integration solution.

 Especially the backbone of a good SOA architecture is the ability to govern the services if the service governance can be automated with well-defined processes then the possibility of a successful SOA implementation is high.

 Mobile first approach 

You would have heard of mobile taking over the internet quite often but in reality the enterprises are moving glacier slow to catch with the momentum happening in mobile space.

 On the other side, the whole consumer market is turning to the mobile user interface. So when designing any solution the first thought should be if the solution is mobile friendly or not. If not mobile optimized, it should be a native mobile app.

 For enterprise system, this means understanding the mobile-optimized way of publishing data for external consumption. The data needs to be sliced and diced to be consumed by a handheld device.

The integration technology should support data use of any devices and system in a single interface.

 API to provide the interoperability 

Extending the above-discussed point, API is the way to expand your toolset features to work with various technology systems. It provides the interoperability seamlessly without the need to develop or maintain the services separately.

Internet of things devices is on the rise and estimated that about 50 billion devices would be part of the internet of things by 2020 compared to 18 billion in 2015.

 Imagine with such high growth of various types of devices, it is inevitable that the services that are developed should be exposed as API’s.

A good API management tool will enable the services to be consumed by almost all types devices. It can be quickly configured to support many types of implementations from the web client to enterprise services.

 They also provide inbuilt security, service monitoring and versioning features. This API manager can be the gateway to expose all the enterprise services to the external world.

 The main advantage of using the API management gateways to set it once and reuse it multiple platforms.

 Metering and analytics

 One of the critical pieces in business growth is having a clear understanding of the existing system performance. This analytics helps to take the right decision on either budgeting for IT or to understand how the business systems are interacting with your customers/partners.

 More granular the analytics are the better the visibility you get inside your systems. These analytics also helps in quickly moving and changing the system architecture by understanding the patterns of your services.

 Furthermore, these analytics could also assist in defining the SLA’s for the system. Setting rate limit on the services consumed and even use to chargeback your customer or partner on the usage of the services or resources.

 The future of integration design will have these analytics enabled in the systems, especially these kind of analytics will be mandatory in any integration layer going forward.

 Most important - Security

 We all know the importance of securing the systems, however with the change in technology trends the security protocols are also changing.

 There are two ways to look at security.

 Security when connecting directly to an end consumer. - This is the place where all the hacks happen, and user person data stolen. In turn costing a lot to the business.

 Security when connecting to a partner business system. - Exchanging information between system is equally important to secure. The only difference is how the security works when presented with an enormous volume of traffic without compromising performance.

 Any threat to these systems and service could be extremely expensive to the business, so securing these types of connections are highly vital to any business system.

 The solutions to the above problems exist in many forms, however in integration layer the design should be accounted at the endpoint level where the connection established.

 A good security gateway, that covers these industry best practices and latest security standards. Would not only help to secure the services but also help separate the security logic outside the application layer, enabling better performance gains and better maintenance.

 Conclusion:

 As the technology architecture is changing dramatically, so is the Integration. The evolution of integration is turning its face from designing an integration process to solving the business problems in real time.

 Although there are so many technologies and tools available in the market to solve these problems, the actual integration as a service begins with understanding your business process and architecting the integration about the business needs.