Category Archives: integration architecture

How did we get to Microservices?

If you have struggled with decisions when designing APIs or Microservices – it is best to take a step back and look at how we got here. It helps not only renew our appreciation for the rapid changes we have seen over the past 10-20 years but also puts into perspective why we do what we do

I still believe a lot of us cling to old ways of thinking when the world has moved on or is moving faster than we can process. APIs and microservices are not just new vendor-driven fads rather they are key techniques, processes and practices for businesses to survive in a highly evolving eco-system. Without an API-strategy, for example, your business might not be able to provide the services to consumers your competition can provide or with the quality of service we have come to expect (in real-time)

So, with that in mind let us take a step back and look at the evolution of technology within the enterprise and remember that this aligns to the business strategy

Long time ago

There were monolithic applications,  mainframe systems for example processing Order, Pricing, Shipment etc. You still see this monolith written within startups because they make sense – no network calls, just inter-process communication and if you can join a bunch of tables you can make a “broker” happy with a mashup of data

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1. First, there was just the legacy monolith application

Circa 2000s MVC app world

No ESB yet. Exploring the JVM and Java for enterprise application development. JSF was new and EJB framework was still deciding what type of beans to use. Data flowed via custom connectors from Mainframe to these Java applications which cached them and allowed viewing and query of this information

There were also functional foundation applications for enterprise logging, business rules, pricing, rating, identity etc. that we saw emerging and data standards were often vague. EAI patterns were being observed but not standardized and we were more focused on individual service design patterns and the MVC model

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2. Then we built lots of MVC applications and legacy monolith, integration was point-to-point

Services and Service-Oriented Architecture

The next wave began when the number of in-house custom applications started exploding and there was a need for data standardization, a common language to describe enterprise objects and de-coupled services with standards requests and responses

Some organisations started developing their own XML based engines around message queues and JMS standards while others adopted the early service bus products from vendors

Thus Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) was born with lofty goals to build canonical enterprise data models, reduce point-point services (Java applications had a build-time dependency to services they consumed, other Java services), add standardized security, build service registry etc

We also saw a general adoption and awareness around EAI patterns – we finally understood what a network can do to consistency models and the choice between availability and consistency in a partition. Basically stuff known by those with a Computer Science degree working on distributed computing or collective-communication in a parallel computing cluster

One key observation is that the vendor products supporting SOA were runtime monoliths in their own right. It was a single product (J2EE EAR) running on a one or more application servers with a single database for stateful processes etc. The web services we developed over this product were mere XML configuration which was executed by one giant application

Also, the core concerns were “service virtualisation” and “message-based routing”, which was a pure stateless and transformation-only concept. This worked best when coupled with an in-house practice of building custom services and failed where there was none and the SOA product had to simply transform, route (i.e. it did not solve problems by itself as an integration layer)

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3. We started to make integration standardised and flexible, succeed within the Enterprise but failed to scale for the Digital world. Not ready for mobile or cloud

API and Microservices era

While the SOA phase helped us move away from ugly file-based integrations of the past and really supercharged enterprise application integration, it failed miserably in the digital customer domain. The SOA solutions were not built to scale, they were not built for the web and the web was scaling and getting jazzier by the day; people were expecting more self-service portals and XML parsers were response times!

Those of us who were lucky to let go off the earlier dogma (vendor coolade) around the “web services” we were building started realising there was nothing webby about it. After a few failed attempts at getting the clunk web portals working, we realised that the SOA way of serving information was not suited to this class of problems and we needed something better

We have come back a full circle to custom build teams and custom services for foundation tasks and abstractions over end-systems – we call these “micro-services” and build these not for the MVC architecture but as pure services. These services speak HTTP  natively as the language of the web, without custom standards like SOAP had introduced earlier and use a representational state transfer style (REST) pattern to align with hypermedia best-practices; we call them web APIs and standardise around using JSON as the data format (instead of XML)

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4. Microservices, DevOps, APIs early on – it was on-prem and scalable

The API and Microservices era comes with changes in how we organise (Dev-Ops), where we host our services (scalable platforms on-prem or available as-a-service) and a fresh look at integration patterns (CQRS, streaming, caching, BFF etc.). The runtime for these new microservices-based integration applications is now broken into smaller chunks as there is no centralised bus 🚎

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5. Microservices, DevOps, APIs on externalised highly scalable platforms (cloud PaaS)

Recap

Enterprise system use has evolved over time from being depended on one thing that did everything to multiple in-house systems to in-house and cloud-based services. The theme has been a gradual move from a singular application to a network partitioned landscape of systems to an eco-system of modular value-based services

Microservices serve traditional integration needs between enterprise systems but more importantly enable organisations to connect to clients and services on the web (cloud) in a scalable and secure manner – something that SOA products failed to do (since they were built for the enterprise context only). APIs enable microservices to communicate with the service consumers and providers in a standard format and bring with them best practices such as contract-driven development, policies, caching etc that makes developing and operating them at scale easier

De-mystifying the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) landscape: Actors, terminology, cadence and protocols

Any form of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) [1] work for data synchronization,  digital transformation or customer self-service web implementation involves communication between the service providers and service consumers. A web of connections grows over time between systems, facilitated by tools specialising in “system-integration”; this article covers how the clients, services and integration tools communicate and nuances around this observed in the wild

EAI Actors

Depending on the context, a system becomes a data-consumer or data-provider. These consumers and providers can be internal to a business enterprise or external to them. External providers can be pure software-as-a-service or partners with platforms and build teams entrenched in the “client-site”

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1. Services, Consumers within and outside a business enterprise

The provider and consumer systems are the key actors within an internal or external system-integration context. Cadences vary as some provider services are stable and mature, while others are developed with the client applications

Service/API Contract

Providers and Consumers communicate with each other using one of many standard protocols; also consumers have a direct dependency on service provider’s “service contract” to know about these protocols and service details

A service contract is a document describing one or more services offered by a service provider and covers details such as protocol, methods, data type and structure etc.

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2. Consumer, Service provider and Service Contract

A good service contract contains well-documented details of the service as well as “examples” of the request, response and errors. RAML [3] and Swagger/OAS [4] are two of the popular tools used in documenting service contracts

For example, the “Address search” contract by a SaaS vendor below describes the method, URI, query parameters and provides the user with the ability to “try out” the service. This approach allows consumers to iterate faster when developing solutions that use address search without having to engage the SaaS vendor teams (self-service)

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3. A Service Contract on an API Portal [2]

Service Contract Cadence: Contract Driven Development

Contract cadence is when a service contract is available compared to when the client wants to build their application. There are 2 cadences – mature and in-flight.

For a mature/pre-existing service, a good service contract allows the service consumer to develop a client application without having to engage a service provider person. Meanwhile, for a service being developed with the client application, there is an opportunity for both teams to author the service contract together during the elaboration phase of a project

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4. Deliver Cadence based on Service Contract Availability

Service contracts are key to consuming a service; when consuming mature services look for descriptive, sandbox-enabled, self-service services to supercharge your delivery. For services being developed in a project (along with the client applications), by internal teams or external vendors, ask for contracts upfront and ask for consumers & service providers to co-author the contracts to remove ambiguities sooner 

Avoid generating service contracts from developed components (Java Class to WSDL) as this technique leads to isolated, one-way, ambiguous specifications requiring considerable hand-holding and has the most defects during integration testing (from experience). Use Contract Driven Development [8] which facilitates the writing of a contract by the Service Provider and the Consumer together during Elaboration phase (sign in blood if adventurous)  

API Styles: RPC, REST,

Now what we have services, contracts out of the way we can dig deeper into how messages get over the wire in the real-time services. We will ignore “B2B protocols” for this discussion and leave them for the future

The four common real-time service protocols we see all are built over HTTP using  JSON or XML content-type and different in their implementation. Below is a short description of each

  • REST
    • Is the most service protocol for front-end applications and modern enterprise APIs. Is stateless, cacheable, uniform, layered etc and came from this [6]
    • A resource is a key abstraction in REST and a hard concept for integration-practitioners to master
    • Mature REST APIs look like Hypertext, i.e. you can navigate them like you would the web
    • Uses HTTP methods e.g. GET, PUT, POST, Patch for query and command
    • Uses HTTP status codes for communicating the response e.g. 2xx, 4xx, 5xx
    • Open to custom or standard request/response data-types. Standard hypermedia types include HAL, JSON API, JSON-LD, Siren etc. [4]
    • Requires resource-centric thinking
  • GrapQL
  • Streaming APIs
    • HTTP Streaming
    • Websockets
    • SSE
    • HTTP2/Push
    • gRPC
  • gRPC
  •  SOAP
    • Use to be popular before REST came along
    • Uses HTTP POST with the body containing request details – method-name, request etc in XML
    • Uses XML schemas for describing data types
  • Json-RPC
    • Semi-popular with some legacy clients
    • Uses HTTP POST with the body containing request details – method-name, request etc in JSON
    • Uses JSON object to define the method and data
  • OData
    • Used in CRM, ERP etc enterprise systems to reduce client-side development through config driven service consumptions
    • Presents the end service as a “data source” to the consumer, allowing SQL like query
    • Uses schema for describing data source objects and atom/XML  for transmitting over the wire
    • Requires custom parsers for parsing URL which contains the “query” to be mapped to the back-end service

There is plenty to cover in this space and in a future post, I will compare these protocols further and flavour them from experience. The key takeaway here though is that there are many many ways in which service provides and service consumers can communicate, most choose REST or SOAP over HTTP, there are passionate conversations over REST/SOAP, JSON/XML, HAL/JSON-API/Siren all the while OData remains a mystery to us -until we need to deal with it

EAI Patterns

There are heaps to learn about “how” these service providers and consumers communicate in a networked environment but below is a quick overview of these patterns. These patterns emerge because of the CAP Theorem [7] and the Network partition  between these systems looking to exchange data

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5. Integration Communication Patterns used by Service Providers and Consumers

Recap

  1. Enterprise Integration involves internal, external, batch and real-time services
  2. Key actors are service providers, consumers and mediators
  3. Service contracts are key documents in integrating
  4. The cadence between provider and consumer impacts delivery velocity
  5. Service protocols vary but there are 4-main types: REST, SOAP, JSON-RPC and OData

References

[1] EAI Patterns https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/

[2] Experian REST API https://www.edq.com/documentation/apis/address-validate/rest-verification/#/Endpoints/Search_Address

[3] RAML https://raml.org/

[4] SWAGGER https://swagger.io/

[5] Choosing Hypermedia Formats https://sookocheff.com/post/api/on-choosing-a-hypermedia-format/

[6] Roy Fielding’s dissertation https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm

[7] CAP Theorem or Brewer’s Theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

[8] Contract Driven Development https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-71289-3_2

[9] gRPC https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3

 

Tackling complexity: Using Process maps to improve visibility of integrated system features

“Entropy always increases “– second law of thermodynamics

Enterprise systems are similar to isolated physical systems, where the entropy or hidden-information always increases. As the business grows, our technology footprint grows as new systems are implemented, new products and cross-functional features are imagined and an amazing network of integrations emerge

Knowing how information flows and managing the chaos is therefore critical organisations are to move beyond “Functional-1.0” into “Lean-2.0” and “Strategic-3.0”  in their implementations. We discuss how current documentation and technical registries simply “tick the box” and there is a better approach to manage increasing complexity through better context

Enterprise Integration Uses Integrations

Current state: Integration Interface Registries with little context

The network of integrations/interfaces (blue-circles above) are often captured in a technically oriented document called “Interface Registry” in a tabular form by teams performing systems integration. While these tables provide details around “who” (producer/consumer details) and “how” (the type of integration) they cannot describe “when” and “why” (use case).  As projects grow and interfaces grow or are re-used the number of when and whys increase over time and entropy (hidden information) around these interfaces grows; this leads to chaos as teams struggle to operate, manage and change them without proper realisation of the end-to-end picture

As a result, only maintaining a technical integration Interface registry leads to poor traceability (business capability to technical implementation), increased maintenance-cost of interfaces ( hard to test for all scenarios) and leads to duplication of effort over time ( as change becomes complex, teams rewrite)

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Integration Interface Repository

Therefore without proper context around Integration Interfaces, organisations will struggle to manage and map cross-functional features leading to slower lead-time, recovery etc over time. We propose that documenting integration use-cases, in a business-friendly visual language and related them to technical interface lists and enterprise capabilities is the key to mastering the chaos

Mastering the chaos: Building a context map

Context is key as it

  1. It drives product-centric thinking vs project-based thinking
  2. It makes our solution more operable, maintainable and re-useable 

In order to  provide better context and do it in a clear visually-oriented format, we believe documenting integration user-stories as technical process flows is a good start

Consider the following use-case: “As a user, I must be able to search/register/update etc in a system”.  Use-cases begin all start with some activation point – a user, timer or notification and then involve orchestration of services or choreography of events resulting in actions within microservices or end-systems eventually delivering some value through a query or command. We can render such a use-case into a map showing the systems, interfaces and actions in them (activation point, services, orchestrations, value) and do so in a standard manner

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For example, we leveraged the Business Process Management Notation – BPMN 2.0 standards to map integration technical use-case flows where we used general concepts like “swim-lanes” for user and systems, “arrows” for Interfaces (solid for request-response interfaces, dotted-lines for async messages) etc.

The Picture below shows this concept along with the “Interface” lines and “Messages” connecting the boxes (actions) between systems. Each interface or message then was linked to the Integration Interface Registry so that it was easy to trace reuse and dependencies

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It was also important that the context picture above is fairly lean as it avoids documenting too much to avoid becoming a single giant end-to-end picture with everything on it. It is best to stay within a bounded-context and only refer to a specific use-case such as “User Registration” or “Order submission” or “Customer Management” etc. This has the added advantage of helping teams which speak a ubiquitous language talk to a collection of pictures belonging to their domain and integration-practitioners to identify a collection of such teams (bounded-contexts)

Building a library and related to EA

The journey to improve visibility and maintenance of integration artefacts then involves capturing these integration use-case context maps, storing them in a version-controlled repository, relating them to other technical and business repositories

This collection of context maps would contain similar information to a “high-level enterprise system integration view” but with a greater degree of clarity

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This collection can also be linked to the Enterprise Architecture (EA) Repository for full end-to-end traceability of Business Capabilities into Technical Implementations. In fact, the TOGAF framework describes an external Business Architecture repository pattern as part of Solution building blocks (see TOGAF structural framework )

We imagine the Integration Context Map repository linked to the Enterprise Architecture Repository and the Integration Interface repository as shown below – this would provide immense value to cross-functional teams and business stakeholders, allowing both to see a common picture

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Sequence flows or process flows?

Sequence diagrams can also be used to document technical use-cases with systems and interfaces, however similar to the Integration interface list, they then to be difficult to consume for the non-technical users and lack the clarity provided by process maps

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As a general rule of thumb we found the following segregation to be useful:

  1. What: Technical process flows for end-to-end visibility, especially useful in complex long-running distributed features.  Sequence diagrams for technical component designs, best for describing how classes or flows/sub-flows (in Mule, for example) interact
  2. Who:  Context maps by Business Analysts (BA) or Architect and Sequence flows by Developers
  3. When: Context maps by Business Analysts (BA) as early as during project Discovery, providing inputs to sizing and visual map of what-is-to-be (sketch?). Sequence flows by Developers, as a task in Development story
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Let us talk tools

There are a variety of tools that can help document process context maps in a standard BPMN 2.0 format. The key criteria here is to produce a standard artefact – a BPMN 2.0 diagram so that it can be managed by standard version-control tools and rendered to documents, team wikis etc. though tools/plugins

Below is a list of tools you can try, we recommend not getting too hung up on tools and instead focus on the practice of documenting integration use-cases

Tools

Recap

  1. As enterprise projects deliver more integrated solutions, it becomes harder to manage and change integration interfaces without proper traceability
  2. Improve traceability of a single end-to-end use-case through a context map
  3. You can use BPMN 2.0 for a standardised notation to do this and use tools to generate these context maps as .bpmn files
  4. You can version control these .bpmn  files and build a collection of context maps
  5. You can link these context maps to Integration Interface registry and Enterprise Business capability registry for increased traceability across the enterprise
  6. There are many tools to help you write the .bpmn files, don’t get hung up on the tools. Start documenting and linking to the interface registry

Conclusion

The context map collection then becomes very useful for enterprise architecture, integration operations, new project teams, testing etc. as a common visual artefact as it relates to the users, systems and interfaces they use 

Enterprise Integration process maps then become a powerful tool over time as they greatly improve visibility across the landscape and help teams navigate a complex eco-system through a contextual and meaningful visual tool; this leads to better open and maintainable integration products leading to reuse and cost-efficiency