The increasing rise in the adoption of services by organizations prompts the need to generate an architecture that is oriented to them. One of the direct and most common consequences of this rise is the proliferation of services using several technologies and protocols for development and implementation across the entire organization. In these cases, there is a need for service versioning, configuration standardization, etc.
Having a service-oriented architecture is paramount, which does not imply that it does not have its drawbacks. In these types of architectures, we have to face functionality duplication when improperly handling a great amount of such functionalities; the way to measure and enforce SLAs (Service Level Agreements); and how to set forth organization policies that consider current services and the prospective addition of others.
–Are the microservices the end of the ESB?–
What is an ESB used for?
The Enterprise Service Bus should be robust enough to allow for changes in requirements without this having any impact on services that are already installed. The event system and infrastructure should be capable of connecting any IT resource independently of the technology it uses.
- Maximum security. Authentication, authorization, and encryption functionalities are provided over ESB. As previously stated, it provides authentication, authorization and encryption both for incoming and outgoing messages, which complies with security requirements requested by service providers.
- Improves message routing. ESB offers an interesting functionality which adds information to messages missing a part. Through routing, it establishes the destination of incoming messages.
- Central platform. Thanks to ESB, communication with an application can be achieved without linking the message receiver with the sender. In other words, it dissociates the end user from the location of a particular service provider.
- For ESB to be safe and provide a high performance, monitoring and management are essential. It also allows for controlling the flow of messages and monitor their execution. It is the most efficient way to identify messages and routes between services.
- ESB integrates over FTP, HTTPs, JMS, TCP or SMTP, among other transport protocols, and it does so seamlessly.
- Message conversion. Transformation is one of the most important features of an ESB, which can be used to convert messages from one format to another using standards such as XPath and XSLT.
In addition to assembling services and combining them, an ESB should facilitate the connection of web services, new applications and different types of applications. An example for the latter would be legacy middleware over adapters, batch files or LOB (Line of Business) applications.
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The goal of Enterprise Service Bus is to improve and foster business growth
There are currently many ESB solutions that can be found on the market, all of them focused on helping companies operate efficiently and make the right choices. It is the most direct way to improve and foster business growth by seizing the advantages of an architecture oriented towards services with all guarantees. Oracle, through Service Bus, and Kafka Confluent, which has focused on event-driven ESBs, are the leading initiatives in this field.
