In today’s fast-paced IT landscape, enterprises must be agile to respond to evolving business needs and brace themselves with the required changes on time. Without these, there are more chances of businesses getting left behind in the lurch. When it comes to integration, legacy systems neither have the potential to leverage their features rapidly nor can they equip the organization to innovate and build faster. Rather, they hamper the growth, productivity, and innovation of the applications and struggle to keep up with modern business requirements.
With the advent of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDL), integration has traveled a long path. Beginning from the Monolithic Point-to-Point integration to the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), we have now evolved and surpassed all of that and reached the modern times of integration – where we redefine integration as Microservices and API – This is where Integration Platform as a service (iPaaS) comes into picture.
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The illustration above makes everything clear. The craving for desserts, right now? Oh yeah, it also demonstrates the evolution of Integration.
Before we discuss the modern integration iPaaS, let’s understand the legacy methodologies and their shortcomings first.
Why is everyone trying to escape from the legacy middleware?
Although we have had the traditional Point-to-point integration, it had multiple connectors with no scope for scaling, leaving no room for innovation. ESBs were then introduced but they also fall short and are insufficient to address the modern application requirement.
- The legacy middleware, which is also known as the ESB, demands significant time, effort, and cost, without which it cannot stay up and running.
- They require an army of different skillsets to establish this.
- The ESBs struggle to address modern requirements as they are not particularly designed for supporting cloud technologies.
- ESBs are tightly coupled and have a reluctance to adopt modern integrations and features thus making them unfeasible for any changes.
- Getting them installed is a huge challenge ‘cos these ESBs are too laborious and are quite time- consuming.
- Even when you have the ESBs installed, maintaining them is an uphill task creating space for shadow IT.
- They are expensive and consume too much of your resources.
- They are prone to bugs, bottlenecks, errors and can cause disruption in the entire system.
The lack of flexibility, automation, and opportunity for innovation makes enterprises look out for better alternatives. Thus, enterprises are seeking ways through which they can eliminate this middleware, increase agility, and leverage the application to its optimal use with seamless integrations.
It’s high time to move away from your legacy integration middleware. But what next?
The changing phase of integration – big role of microservices and APIs
There are actually two approaches to getting this integration done.
1.If you are already using an ESB for integration and don’t want to make any major modifications, you can just add a layer of API management/gateway on top of your ESB.
Exposing the functionalities of the application as services/ APIs is now the key aspect of modern enterprise architecture. However, this isn’t the ideal solution for rapidly innovating businesses.
2.The other method is to remove the ESB completely and include microservices in their place and enable them through APIs as shown below.
Microservices tend to be the best feasible solution to overcome the drawbacks of the ESB approach. With microservices, you breakdown the application into a suite of fragmented and smaller independent services, that are developed, deployed and maintained independently without impacting other components.
With this approach, you dismantle and demolish the ESB, make them microservices and enable their access through API / Gateway. These microservices can directly connect with the core components and can be developed/modified/updated independently.
“Consumes less effort, is more agile, and has a faster time to market – Integration using microservices – the need of the hour for today’s modern enterprises.”
Impact of IPaaS architecture
No-code Low-code platform for all business users
To use these platforms, you’d not need a code ninja or a tech geek. People who can comprehend the basic tech, fundamental principles of your business, and the requirements clearly, can work on these platforms. The intuitive and easy-to-use drag-and-drop UI makes integration building even simpler.
In-built native connectors
The iPaaS platforms provide a library of native connectors of numerous modern SaaS applications and accelerate your growth by fastening the developments. The implementation and deployments are done rapidly without any patchwork or error-logging.
No hardware no software
All that they require is a lightweight run-time engine for managing the connections. They require neither hardware nor software for managing integrations. Ultimately, the integration will be faster and easier. Leverage the pre-built integrations and build connections rapidly.
Flexible, agile, and personal
You can create integration, modify, and update them when needed. Since these platforms are cloud-based solutions, they can be run from anywhere anytime. Should you need to make changes to the business logic, you can do it seamlessly without embedding the logic in its central location. So, all your business logic remains intact and confidential.
Security and compliance
When you break down the application into microservices, it enables transparency and brings everything to a centralized platform. This paves the way for identifying threats easily and responding to them immediately. The iPaaS platforms implement changes in the environment automatically making the regulation compliance simpler.
Reduce risks and save thousands of dollars
The iPaaS platforms reduce the complexity and risks of building integrations and automating workflows as it is all handled by the platform itself. The pay-as-you-go model gives flexibility to the users and is very inexpensive when compared to traditional middleware.
Why NOW is the time to move to iPaaS?
If you aspire to be competitive in the market, stay ahead of the curve, and meet modern business demands, it’s high time you give a thought about the “Microservice-wash” to all your tools and platforms. Legacy systems and ESBs will certainly hinder your growth and holding on to the on-prem integrations will eventually hamper the progress of your business.
The cloud has so many benefits and with that, the values microservices and containers bring to the table makes it evident that they are here to remain with us and transform the way we build applications. With the robust iPaaS solutions, increasing productivity and deriving revenues by enabling automation becomes easier.
Choosing the right iPaaS for your business
To make the orchestration between applications and products favorable for your business, you need to pick the most suitable iPaaS vendor with state-of-the-art features and economical pricing. Not just that, having experts of the respective platforms to get the integrations right is essential without whom the entire system gets cumbersome.
The iPaaS industry is led by the three most reliable and prominent leaders, Boomi, MuleSoft, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. Identifying the right platform suitable for your business requirements is critical. We have in-depth expertise in all the three leading iPaaS platforms and we will help you to determine the most befitting one for your business.
Our team has done extensive research and dealt with pragmatic approaches for various clients to get their integrations right using the iPaaS solutions.
Choose AVASOFT as your iPaaS implementation partner, expedite your developments, and accelerate your organization’s growth!
Winding it up!
Your applications are loaded with valuable data and assets that can lead your business to prosperity. After a period of time, these data will get lost and it’s difficult to retrieve them. If your objective is to mine the data stored at the bottom of your application’s architecture, make optimal use of it, or even modernize it to make it modular, adaptable, and contemporary, to address the present-day needs, our iPaaS solutions will facilitate just that!
Diminish integration redundancy, unlock digital transformation, and modernize your application’s integration with our iPaaS solutions now!
