Intellyx BrainBlog for Digibee by Jason Bloomberg
Enterprise applications of the 1960s through the 1980s were monolithic, closed affairs. The creators of these behemoths had no thought whatsoever for connecting one to another.
Architectures were product-specific. User interfaces were proprietary. And the easiest way to move data from one system to another was to print it in one place and manually retype the information at the other.
By the 1990s, organizations were struggling with a rats’ nest profusion of point-to-point integrations, confusing the operators who had to keep everything running and confounding developers who dreaded making any kind of change, for fear of breaking the entire tangle.
Something had to give. By the late 1990s, an entirely new category of enterprise infrastructure software came on the scene: middleware. Middleware addressed the rats’ nest problem of point-to-point integrations by providing a hub and spoke architecture.
And then along came the cloud. And DevOps. And eventually, modern cloud-native computing. The middleware-centric approaches to integration that sufficed for over a decade suddenly became appallingly obsolete.
The archaic hub-and-spoke way of thinking, however, still pervades the modern enterprise integration shop, slowing down organizations and limiting their agility and hence their competitiveness.
It’s time for a change. Enterprises require integration that supports an application landscape that responds quickly to changes in customer needs, competitive environments, as well as technology capabilities. It’s time for a hybrid integration platform.
Rethinking the Integration Heavy Lift
Because integration has always been a difficult challenge, people would always approach it as a ‘one and done’ effort. Clearly, if integration is so difficult, you want to pick your integration battles, take any extra time necessary to get them right, and then leave them alone for as long as possible.
At best, therefore, integration efforts would target high-priority, low-flexibility problems that would benefit most from rigid, time-consuming efforts.
However, for those integration needs that might involve lower priority requirements or situations that would benefit from high levels of flexibility, traditional middleware-based integration simply wasn’t up to the task.
The modern hybrid integration platform (HIP) of today takes an entirely different approach from this older infrastructure software.
First, a HIP should be cloud-native. Cloud-native infrastructure leverages microservices and containers in addition to traditional virtualization and even serverless functions to provide for inherently dynamic, massively scalable application environments.
At the core of most of today’s cloud-native environments is Kubernetes, the leading open source container orchestration platform – but cloud-native means more than simply running on Kubernetes.
It’s more of a modern architectural paradigm for enterprise computing that takes a configuration-driven approach to all aspects of the infrastructure, including integration.
A cloud-native HIP will thus support dynamic endpoints, which might be ephemeral containers, serverless functions, or more traditional application endpoints.
