ESBs vs. Traditional integrations

Those just starting to explore the world of integrations often have quite different opinions on ESBs, enterprise service buses. So, we decided to explain the following points to clear up what businesses should explore ESBs further and which ones do not need to hop on these buses:

• How Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) can improve software development speed and quality;
• How ESB allows different software applications to communicate with each other by acting as a central hub for data exchange;  
• Improving the quality of software by enabling better monitoring and testing of the entire system and facilitating the reuse of components across different applications;
• The importance of ESB in modern software development and its potential to advance.

ESB is a set of integration solutions, including monitoring, a queue broker, and a low-code jobs builder. In reality, it is a whole network designed to address the issue of data exchange. It might be a cloud solution or a self-hosted system installed on your servers, which could be determined by your organization’s and the development team’s sizes.

Creating integrations without ESB

Let’s assume your company needs to develop an integration between your CRM system and your business’ store. The first step is to decide on the API format and then create the extensions.

So, what if the integration fails? For example, the CRM stops receiving information. Your team will need to create and begin keeping logs in the store, as well as attempt to migrate the data to CRM. And the logs will demonstrate that everything is correctly transmitted to the CRM.

Whoever is responsible for your CRM will assert that there are no issues with the system. After some time, you’ll see that the issue is with a certain customer characteristic that cannot be verified, for example, someone using only two letters in their surname, while your systems only allow names with three or more letters.

So, that means several things:

• In traditional integrations, problems are only detected after they have already affected business processes, wasting valuable resources and affecting the ability to make changes to other systems;
• If it’s a routine task, developers can become exhausted and leave behind complex and inefficient code;
• Whoever has to fix that code will have to spend additional time on it;
• Every integration is done slowly and without a clear result;
• Additional code will make your systems too complicated.

You might want to look somewhere else. That’s where ESBs come into play.

One System vs. Tons of Logic

If you ever add a new system to your architecture, you might find yourself buried in a tangled mess of integrations. It’s a common problem that can leave you with a system that’s hard to understand, support, and fix.

With ESB, you can entrust the tasks of ensuring data transfer to a separate team, freeing up the backlogs of teams developing the rest of the system. Your development teams can focus on building the product and enhancing its business value while separate technical operators support integrations.

ESB simplifies the integration process by providing a generic API, so you don’t need to build custom integrations for every system. Instead, your e-Shop team can configure the integration with ESB quickly and easily, often with no code required.

And if a problem arises, ESB makes it easy to pinpoint where the issue occurred. You can quickly check the corresponding record in ESB to determine if the problem is in the CRM or ERP systems or if it occurred in the e-Shop’s area of responsibility. Plus, most problems can be solved by technical support without involving developers.

ESB also works well with microservices. With ESB, you can easily translate between different contexts and attributes and define service boundaries using process management approaches.

When to abandon ESB?

However, not all businesses require the use of an ESB, and some may find simpler methods more suitable for their integration needs.

Smaller organizations with limited budgets may not require ESB as they can achieve their integration needs using simpler methods. For example, they may use APIs integrate their applications. APIs allow applications to communicate with each other without the need for a centralized hub, which is the case with ESB. APIs are relatively simple to set up and use, making them an ideal solution for small businesses with limited resources.

Additionally, businesses that only require basic data exchange may not need ESB. If the integration requirements of an application are limited to basic data exchange, such as simple file transfer or batch processing, then a more straightforward integration approach, such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol), may be sufficient. This is especially true for businesses that do not have a large number of applications to integrate.

It’s essential to evaluate your organization’s size, development team, and integration needs before deciding to use ESB. Larger organizations with a dedicated development team and complex integration requirements may find ESB to be the best fit. On the other hand, smaller organizations with limited resources may find simpler integration methods to be more suitable.

In conclusion, ESB is a powerful tool that can help businesses to untangle even the most complex integration challenges. However, it’s important to evaluate your organization’s size, development team, and integration needs before deciding to use ESB. If ESB is the right fit for your organization, it can significantly improve software development speed and quality and provide many benefits that simplify the integration process.

Whether you choose to keep things traditional or transition to an ESB, AINSYS can become a helping hand for you. AINSYS integration framework syncs data between every tool and platform your IT  team employs in their work, helping you get an accurate picture of your software. By leveraging ESB and AINSYS tools, any IT specialist and professionals with no coding skills can ensure that they are making the right decisions for their organization and keeping up with the ever-changing technology landscape.

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