Enterprise Integration for Beginners

 We are happy to release the latest version of solution architecture patterns. This repository contains reusable, enterprise architecture patterns. The 0.9 release comes with new architecture patterns and improvement to the organization of the repository. You can find the link to the github repository below. https://github.com/chanakaudaya/solution-architecture-patterns If you like the work, don't forget to give a star and make a contribution through a PR. 

API driven digital economy is here to stay. Whether you like it or not, you have to embrace that if you have plans to stay along with the competition in your respective domain. But API adoption comes at a cost. Depending on which vendor you are going to choose, you will end up with a considerable cost. Good things do not come easy and they are not free. It is a given that you have to spend some amount of money to get things going in terms of the API driven business. But the real problem is that, what is the benefit you get out of that investment? How long will it take to show some benefits? These problems are nothing new to business leaders since they deal with these sorts of problems day in day out. This article discusses What is Reusability in enterprise IT landscape? What is API Development? How Reusability is affecting in development? What are API Marketplaces? How Reusability is affecting in API consumption? Benefits of API Reusability You can find the link to the full article bel...

Service Oriented Architecture or SOA has been one of the turning points of enterprise IT architecture where it provided the clarity and the order that was missing initially. Then it evolved through the SOA governance to become a well managed and governed IT ecosystem. Once the APIs started to dominate the enterprise architecture, API management has come to the forefront with SOA governance fading away. It didn't happen overnight and there are a lot more to organizations still trying to figure out what is best for them.  This article discusses What is SOA governance? What is API Management? How SOA governance and API Management live together? Please find the link to the full article below. https://medium.com/solutions-architecture-patterns/soa-governance-to-api-management-a-pragmatic-approach-4421a609d015?sk=de16c6ad82f320b4a23ef46de21ba9f8

 If you are not much familiar with how to start your API journey that can grow your business to the next level, this guide provides you the information required to getting started from scratch. This article discusses What is an API? Why you need APIs? How to get started with APIs? How to make your APIs popular? How to expand your API strategy within the organization? How to make your API platform ready for the future? You can find the related article in the below link. https://chanakaudaya.medium.com/how-to-select-an-api-management-platform-for-your-business-668d47a689c4?sk=a34b4df50ac59a26cacd168f298ccc41

Solutions Architects (SAs) are the people who convert deep technical knowledge into a format that can be understood by both technical and non-technical people. They are the bridge between product engineers and salespeople. It is so strange that there is no common knowledge base (KB) that has been shared in the open-source community related to solutions architecture. That was the motivation for me to build such a KB which can be reused by SAs regardless of which technology stack they are working with or promoting. I have started small an initiated a GitHub repository and started contributing solutions architecture patterns which I learn from other people and learn while I’m working as a SA. Today, I have released the  0.3  version of this repository with a set of new solutions architecture patterns. Here is the GitHub repository link for this repository. chanakaudaya/solutions-architecture-patterns This repository contains solutions architecture patterns which c...

People are crazily moving their enterprise platforms to mega clouds. Are they considering the long-term drawbacks of cloud movement? Here's an alternative approach to bring the same agility without moving your enterprise towards the unknown. https://medium.com/@chanakaudaya/understanding-the-pivotal-cloud-foundry-pcf-from-the-outset-bb4925182015

The digital business landscape is helping businesses to grow beyond geographical boundaries. Transforming your business into a digital business is no longer an optional thing, rather it has become a necessity. Early adopters, late boomers, methodical players, every enterprise is trying to modernize its enterprise IT ecosystem to improve the efficiency and become a leader in their respective enterprise domain. If you are an enterprise architect who is responsible for building a digital platform from scratch, modernize an existing IT platform or lift and shift an existing deployment into the cloud, there are 100s of different software and technology vendors available to support your effort. The days of proprietary software is long gone and people are more and more migrating towards open source software(OSS). One of the major challenges of adopting OSS is the maintenance overhead. But that challenge is absorbed by the mega-cloud vendors as well as other cloud services offered by the vendo...

If your enterprise is thinking about moving into cloud, you should be thinking about moving into multi-cloud. The reason is that, you can achieve the below mentioned advantages. Provides much better service availability — Given that your applications are running across multiple cloud environments, your services can run without much interruption even if an entire cloud system goes down. Get enterprises free from vendor lock-in — Cloud vendors always try to get as much applications into their own cloud and that will lock you into a single vendor so that you cannot get away from them even you need to do it. With the multi-cloud approach, you don’t need to lock into any vendor and move away from them at any time. Can negotiate for better deals — Once you are in multi cloud, you have more power to demand for discounts since every vendor wants to increase their share of your account. Can use best technology for the applications — Different cloud vendors are strong in different ar...

Microservices architecture is not a silver bullet for all your enterprise IT system requirements. Some requirements come just after implementing a microservices architecture. Service Mesh and API Management are such mechanisms which works along with microservices to build a comprehensive microservices architecture. The below post explains how these 3 pillars can help you to build an effective microservices platform. https://medium.com/microservices-learning/microservices-service-mesh-and-api-management-7408c001fb31

Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for managing container based deployments. It is a container orchestration platform which provides capabilities like Automatic scaling Self-healing Load balancing  Monitoring Service discovery Storage sharing In a real enterprise deployment, it is essential to understand how kubernetes can be used. The following medium post explains how to use kubernetes in an enterprise context. https://medium.com/solutions-architecture-patterns/kubernetes-deployment-pattern-6fb231c41d87

WSO2 API Manager has become a leader in the API Management space according to the latest Forrester Wave report which was published on 30th October 2018 (Q4, 2018). This announcement has marked a significant landmark on open source development where all the other vendors in the leaders' section are proprietary vendors. In the below medium post, I discuss about what are the important aspects of this announcement to the enterprise software world and the open source community. https://medium.com/wso2-learning/how-wso2-api-manager-is-leading-the-open-source-pack-34277ad1a80f

Microservices hype is not over yet. There are technologies like serverless computing and multi cloud platforms coming up and they will eventually increase the need for microservices style programming and application development. When it comes to enterprise software development, we can see that it is a mixture of traditional soa style systems, api driven systems which are backed my microservices or above mentioned soa systems, cloud based SaaS applications as well as proprietary software systems running on premise. Enterprise is going to be like this for a foreseeable future. It is quite important that as an architect or a senior leader who is responsible for an enterprise software architecture to understand the proper approach to built your software eco system which will be an ever important factor to your business. When it comes to building such a complex system, there are 3 main approaches stands out Polyglot programming model Platform based programming model (open source) Ven...

It's time to rethink about your enterprise IT eco system. Technology space is going through a period of major revamp and whether you accept it or not, it is changing the way people do business. You may be a software architect of a multi billion enterprise or the only software engineer of a small startup organization which is trying to figure their way out in the business world. It is essential to know about the direction of the technology space and make your moves accordingly. At the 33000 feet, enterprises throughout the world are moving (most of them are already moved) towards digital technology. You may have already brought several third party systems in to your IT eco system and they are functioning well within your requirements. All is running well and your organization is profitable.  All is well. Why bother about these hypes? Let me tell you one thing. The world of business is moving so fast that a billion dollar company today will become an organization with a debt on t...

In my previous post  , I have discussed about the facts you need to consider when selecting an integration solution for your enterprise IT infrastructure. I didn't provide any clue on what is the best vendor you can select since that depends on your requirements and budget and many other reasons. In this post, I will do a comparison between several open source and proprietary solutions and differentiate WSO2 ESB (my employer) features with them. Proprietary ESB  Pros  Suite of solutions included and work smoothly with each other (eg: CEP, BPEL, MB, Registry) Powerful and stable tooling and monitoring capabilities Excellent support for price Cons High price, High complexity Licensing and non-transparent pricing model Different components may come from different code bases acquired through different companies Heavy products Installation may need consultants and take more time Open source ESB Pros Simple installation and intuitive toolin...

If you are an IT architect responsible for designing your enterprise IT system, you may have already experienced this topic. Modern IT systems consists of so many different systems developed by different vendors with different technology stacks. Even though those are developed independently, those systems should interact with each other to provide a seamless business experience to your stake holders. This is where the challenge of integration comes into the picture. Integrating heterogenous systems is a very complex task and you need to consider so many things before choosing a proper solution. With this blog post, I am going to discuss about the things which you need to consider when choosing an integration solution for your enterprise. I have grabbed some ideas from the following blog post[1] which also describes a similar topic. [1]  http://www.infoq.com/articles/ESB-Integration Mainly, there are 2 streams of product categories available in the market. Open source softwa...