In any organization, data transfer between multiple systems to achieve business goals is very crucial as well as very critical. Organizations want to ensure that all systems in their business domain are integrated efficiently and systems can collaborate and coordinate to fulfil greater business needs by sharing data with each other when and as desired.
There are different architectural approaches towards integration of heterogeneous systems and applications which continue to evolve with time. Organizations kept on advancing to more and more sophisticated integration approaches by shifting from P2P (Point to Point) integration towards hub & spoke model and then towards ESB architecture which is the subject of discussion in this post.
This post sheds light on basics of ESB architecture, how ESB works, what are the capabilities of an ESB, how organizations can benefit from ESBs and what are the associated challenges of ESB architecture.
If you prefer to read about ESB concepts in text format, continue reading below.
ESB Introduction: What is an Enterprise Service Bus?
ESB (Enterpise Service Bus) is a Bus based architecture to enable integration of multiple heterogeneous systems in an efficient manner. ESB architecture is a sophistication over traditional P2P (Point to Point) and Hub/Spoke integration styles.
ESB acts as an intelligent middleware to enable communication among different systems & applications analogous to a traditional bus transit system where all nearby areas are connected to central bus stations to transport passengers to connected destinations.
Below diagram depicts a typical ESB architecture where multiple systems & applications are integrated through a centralized messaging pipe (Bus). Each integrated system may act as producer or consumer (or both) roles.
Capabilities of an ESB
There are various ESB products available in the market with their own set of capabilities and they vary from each other in terms of feature-set and functionalities. However, certain basics remain same and some capabilities are truly attributed to any ESB which are at the core of any such product.
Below are some of the major capabilities of an ESB:
- Routing
ESBs act as intelligent middleware with capabilities to perform certain actions and decide routing to the integrated systems and applications based on routing criteria or implemented logic at ESB level.
When data is produced by an integrated producer system and sent to the ESB, it is responsibility of ESB to perform routing logic based on certain criteria and route the messages to intended connected consumers.
- Orchestration
ESB layer is also responsible for providing orchestration functionality where it utilizes multiple services to achieve an aggregated/composite task. For example, in a banking environment; an ESB can utilize services from multiple banking modules/applications and provide a composite service as per business needs.
- Transformation/Translation
Each integrated system speaks its own language and understands its own formats which may not be necessarily same as another integrated system. It is responsibility of ESB to perform all needful transformations and translations between different data formats and specifications to ensure that systems can rightly understand each other.
- Mediation/Message Enrichment
Enterprise Service Bus also plays a mediator role where certain mediation policies can be applied on in/out flows and messages may be enriched and customzied as per business needs before they are handed over to consuming integrated systems.
- Transportation/Protocol Conversion
Transporting payload between multiple heterogeneous systems is among the primary capabilities of an ESB as its the core of an ESB. While transporting messages among multiple systems, ESB is also responsible for any protocol conversions to comply with the transport mechanism of integrated parties.
- Non-Functional Consistency
Modern ESBs are also equipped with certain additional features and capabilities including security features, monitoring and management modules and ability to exhibit Fault Tolerant & High Available deployments.
Some ESBs are also topped up by API management capabilities to enable enforcement of API level policies and options to design, test, mock and deploy APIs in on-premise, cloud or hybrid environments.
Benefits of ESB: Why ESB is Important for Any Organization?
By now, you should be able to grasp and understand the significance of an ESB in any organization keeping in mind the capabilities that an ESB has as stated in above section.
With the role of a central layer as middleware, ESB plays a key role in any organization to ensure an efficient, smooth, scalable and robust integration environment to get all information flowing across systems in a secure and reliable manner.
ESB rightly decouples (or loosely couples) different systems in an organization with all routing, transformation, translation, orchestration responsibilities delegated to ESB layer contrary to P2P architecture where each system has to play these roles as well. Through such a decoupled yet fully integrated network of applications & systems; organizations better utilize integartion capabilities and business functionalities can be better addressed.
ESB products available in the market provide a rich set of pre-built, ready to use connectors, plugins, adapters which increase efficiency and greatly improve time to market for the organizations as they don’t need to re-invent the wheel or code these capabilities from the scratch. Additionally, most ESBs come up with visual design capabilities where integration flows and services can be implemented very efficiently through drag drop features without much coding.
With modern ESB acting as an integration backbone in any organization, upgrades, maintenance and scaling of the environment also becomes quite standardized as most of the ESBs in the market are mature and provide rich documentation, professional support and community support. Further, monitoring and management capabilities offered by ESB products further strengthen the grip on the integration layer with a clear picture of the systems and it helps organizations to make better corrective and preemptive actions when and as desired.
What are the Challenges with ESBs?
While we are much convinced about the power of ESB in any organization based on all that we discussed above, we can’t ignore associated challenges as well as no good thing in this world comes without potential risks and cons.
ESB as a middleware with all integrated parties relying on it heavily for integration flows, It can itself become a single point of failure or a bottleneck. Performance issues with ESB layer can directly affect business functionalities of many integrated systems and applications. However, this type of challenge can be mitigated and addressed through a clustered & distributed deployment of ESB layer with proper performance tuning, monitoring and management of this layer. ESB product owners do provide solid support and documentation for dealing with such issues.
With ESB at the middle of many integrated system, regression risk is also worth consideration as any upgrades, updates, changes or customizations at this layer can have potential ripple effect and performance implications for many integrated systems. Again, ESB products do provide ways to avoid such issues through distributed deployments, best practices documents, standard procedures, roll-back features etc.
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