iPaaS: (Moving Enterprise Application Integration to the Cloud ?)

Integration Platform as a Service: (Moving Integration to the Cloud ?)

Let’s begin with a little bit of history about Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus to find out why micro services,API/ iPaaS have become so trendy.

What is SOA?

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a technique that involves the interaction between loosely coupled services that function independently.

What is ESB?

The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a model for inter-application communication that was developed in the era of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Key ESB Products from IBM:-

IBM Integration Bus:- (Message Broker)

IBM Integration Bus (formerly known as WebSphere Message Broker) is IBM's integration broker from the WebSphere product family that allows business information to flow between disparate applications across multiple hardware and software platforms

IBM Websphere Enterprise Service Bus:-

WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a flexible connectivity infrastructure for integrating applications and services. An ESB provides the connectivity to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA), reducing the complexity of integrating applications and services. With WebSphere ESB, you can focus on your core business initiatives instead of IT maintenance.

Dead of ESB?

But ,Today when people mention the term ESB, the first things that typically come to mind are

·       Long    & Expensive development cycles,                                 

·       Inflexibility

·       Complexity

·       P2P Integrations

·       Brittle adapters

·       REST and JSON together are increasingly replacing SOAP and XML, making ESBs less relevant in today’s enterprise SMAC architecture.”

. ESB  designed with good intentions,the heart of legacy ESB technology are the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which are both becoming outdated most legacy ESB implementations grew into overloaded business logic monsters, causing performance issues, especially when attempting to deal with large volumes of data. is a high-speed, agile, and scalable infrastructure that is ubiquitous, able to work with modern data and services both on-premises and in the cloud.

What customers ultimately want from an ESB?

• High-speed
• Agile
• scalable infrastructure
• Suitable for enterprise IT world of the SMACT (social, mobile, analytics, cloud and things)

“If development is moving into the cloud, application integration should soon follow”

Cloud computing 

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which resources are made available over the internet. Most often these resources are extensible and highly visualized resources and they are provided as a service. Cloud computing is broken down in to three categories as follows. SaaS (Software as a Service) is the category of Cloud computing in which the main resources available as a service are software applications. Other two categories are

·       PaaS (Platform as a Service)

·       IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

Integration platform as a Service (iPaaS) delivers a cloud service for application, data, process, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) integration scenarios. It is a multi-tenant platform that supports cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-on-premises, on-premises-to-on-premises and B2B integration. It supports real-time integration and scales to meet the high-volume demands of mobile, extract, transform and load (ETL) and electronic data interchange (EDI) environments.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities are owned and hosted by a service provider and offered to customers on-demand.

Micro Services:-

In computing, microservices is a software architecture style, in which complex applications are composed of small, independent processes communicating with each other using language-agnostic APIs. These services are small, highly decoupled and focus on doing a small task.

 Integration Technologies Supports iPaaS :-

• IBM Bluemix
• ·IBM DevOps
• IBM Cast Iron Live
• Mule ESB
• APIGee
• IBM API Management

Do you agree? Do you see integration platform as a service (iPaaS) as complementary or a long-term replacement of the ESB as more and more of the applications and platforms are delivered in the cloud?