Morgan Kaufmann Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture, Strategies to Transform Information Systems in the Era of Big Data (2014) by 未知

Author:未知
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3.1.2.7.4 Integration Architecture

As the number of application systems, environments, and technologies grew that had to communicate with one another, so emerged the discipline of integration architecture.

The discipline of integration architecture essentially involves the touch points that exist between different components, whether they are software to software, hardware to hardware, or software to hardware. Integration architecture (aka middleware) is responsible for standards and frameworks pertaining to communications and interfaces between application systems, operating system environments, and technologies.

The original and most simple approach to integrating applications is called a point-to-point architecture, where application systems directly communicate to other application systems as necessary. As the number of application systems increase, so does the complexity of having many interconnections.

The first integration architecture to significantly reduce the number of connections was the hub and spoke architecture where each application system had a connection to a shared hub, which acts as a traffic cop to direct communications between application systems. Due to scalability issues, however, federated architectures and distributed architectures (aka peer to peer) were developed to better load balance.

Fast forward to today, and we have SOAs that have loosely bound applications attached to an ESB with application services exposed as Web services, rules engines, and extract transform and load (ETL) products riding inside the ESB and being scheduled by job schedulers outside the ESB.

The Web services aspect of SOA came when IBM and Microsoft agreed upon a communication standard. Shortly after the emergence of Web services, ESB became the agreed-upon standard for the industry, such as for messaging and BPM technologies mentioned in workflow architecture.

Integration architecture is organized into a number of domains.

They include:

■ user integration, which connects a user to applications through networks,

■ process integration, which connects workflow processes to other workflow processes,

■ application integration (aka service integration), which connects applications to other applications, potentially across disparate technology environments,

■ data integration, which performs data movement such as with ESB, ETL or FTP, and

■ partner integration, which includes business to business (B2B) and business to customer (B2C) communications.

As such, integration architecture faces a variety of challenges in dealing with communications protocols, which often vary depending upon the type of platform.

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