Understanding Enterprise Integration: Concepts, Patterns, and Technologies

Application and data integration is the foundation for delivering new customer experiences and services. Typically, a single team manages the monolithic integration technology for the entire enterprise, but applications are becoming increasingly complex—they are distributed and must scale and change rapidly to stay in sync in a competitive market. These new challenges require cloud‑native integration technologies and an iterative approach with agile teams.

What is Enterprise Integration?

Every modern enterprise must share data. If you are a large enterprise trying to leverage big data, you know that big data presents an integration challenge. To achieve this, applications and devices at the core of business strategy must be accessible to each other, often across multiple cloud environments. Enterprise integration includes the technologies, processes, and team structures that connect data, applications, and devices throughout the IT organization.

Over the years, enterprise integration models have evolved from point‑to‑point connections with relatively few nodes, to centralized models using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and now to distributed architectures with many reusable endpoints.

The "What" and "How" of Enterprise Integration

For example, "What do you need to integrate?"

First, enterprise integration is a data challenge. Organizations now have so much data that the term "big data" is often used to describe the size and variety of data sources. Large volumes of data in various non‑standard formats can hold significant business value, but they must first be integrated from multiple sources or applications. The Internet of Things (IoT) also offers a new opportunity to connect customers and analyze useful data through everyday devices, but you must filter the critical data entering the data center. Web applications further increase integration complexity, especially when legacy applications must integrate with service‑based architectures such as microservices.

For example, "How do you integrate your applications, devices, and data?"

In the past, a centrally managed Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) could connect every endpoint in the environment. However, a centralized approach to teams and technology can limit modern systems, which need fast, simple ways to integrate distributed components. Depending on your data and service needs, a combination of messaging, application connectors, data streams, enterprise integration patterns, and APIs is more suitable for modern application development.

Messaging

Messaging is a way for different components in a distributed application architecture to communicate. Components can send and receive messages across different languages, compilers, and operating systems as long as each party understands a common messaging format and protocol.

Service meshes are used to route messages in microservice architectures.

Application Connectors

Application connectors are architectural elements that model the rules for how components interact. They are standard class connections customized for certain APIs, enabling rapid integration of new endpoints.

Data Streams

Data streams provide a continuous flow of information that applications can add to or consume, independent of data transport. For example, Apache Kafka is a distributed data‑stream platform that can publish, subscribe, store, and process record streams in real time.

Enterprise Integration Patterns

EIP is a collection of technology‑agnostic solutions to common integration problems. Patterns also provide developers and architects with a common language to describe integrations.

Application Programming Interfaces

An API is a set of tools, definitions, and protocols for building application software. It allows your product or service to communicate with other products and services without needing to know how they are implemented.