Enterprise Integration for Beginners

Microservices architecture (aka MSA) is reaching a point where handling the complexity of the system has become vital to reap the benefits of the very same architecture brings into the table. Implementing microservices is not a big deal given the comprehensive set of frameworks available (like Spring Boot, DropWizard, NodeJs, MSF4J, etc.). The deployment of the microservices also well covered with containerized deployment tools like docker, kubernetes, Cloud Foundary, Open Shift, etc. The real challenge with the microservices type implemention is the inter-microservice communication. Now we have gone back to the age where we had the spaghetti deployment architecture where service to service communication happens in a point to point manner. Enterprise has come a long way from that position through ESB, API Gateways, Edge proxies, etc. Now it is not possible to go back to the same point in the history. This requirement of inter-microservice communication was not an afterthought. The ...

History of Enterprise Integration The history of enterprise integration goes back to early computer era where we had computers only in large enterprises. The early requirements came from the concept of Material Requirement Planning (MRP) where it requires a system to plan and control production and material flows. With the growth of the businesses and the interactions among different 3rd party organizations, MRP has been evolved into an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems where they are responsible for much more functionalities to bridge the different departments of the enterprise like accounting, finance, engineering, product management and many more. Proprietary ERP solutions were dealing with so many complex use cases and failed really big in some cases. With these lessons, people realized that there should be a better to way to build the enterprise IT infrastructure beyond the ERP systems. Integration and SOA Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) comes into the...

If you are a person who is in the enterprise IT domain, there is a more chance that you may have heard the term "mircoservices". In your organization, there will be many people talking about this and you may already have read lot of material on this term. First of all, it is a great idea and if you can use those concepts in your enterprise, that is pretty good. So then, what is this topic all about? Let me explain a bit about the topic and the message I want to spread. If you are an old enough IT professional, you may have gone through the hype of SOA and might have been adopted that in your enterprise. After spending millions of dollars and years of engineering time, now you have a solid SOA adoption and everything is running well (not perfect). As you know, technology industry does not allow you to settle down. It does not care about your money or time, it will keep on throwing some new concepts and jargons in to the picture. Micro services is that kind of thing which...