Check out this post by Glenn Donovan: The History of Middleware. From the enterprise service bus (ESB) to the integration competency center (ICC), he has a lot to say about the good, bad and ugly of legacy enterprise application integration (EAI) and extract, transform and load (ETL) technologies. The central theme – it’s about the need for simplicity and speed, which has become even more critical for successful cloud integration deployments. Here are a few noteworthy observations in the post:
On the bureaucracy of the ICC:
“Sure you could build competency centers and “factories” but to this day, such approaches end up creating more bureaucracy, more dependencies and complexity while adding less and less value compared to what a developer can build him/herself with RESTful services/micro-services, and most things one wants to integrate with today already have well defined APIs so it’s often much easier to connect and share data anyway.”
On the ESB:
“Along the way, a problem became obvious. The cost, expertise, complexity and time involved in building such elegantly designed and governed systems frameworks ran counter to building systems fast. A good developer could get something done that worked and was high quality without resorting to using all those WS standardized services and conforming to its structure.”
On the need for a new enterprise platform to replace the legacy ESB:
“I think many are ready to dump all that highly complex and expensive overhead which came along with messaging buses when an enterprise class platform comes along that enables them to do so.”
Simplicity = IT agility:
“This is all coming together now, so you will see growing interest in throwing out the old integration server/message bus architectures in organizations focused on transformation and agility as core values.”
Check out the entire article to understand the author’s point of view. As a veteran of the middleware industry, he’s looking at modern integration platform as a service (iPaaS) vendors like SnapLogic as having: “the potential help IT with the “last mile” of cloud build-out in the enterprise, not just due its features, but rather because of the shift in software engineering and design occurring that started in places like Google, Amazon and Netflix – and startups that couldn’t afford and “enterprise technology stack” – and is now making its way into the enterprise.”
In(tegrate) the Clouds 