Using Modern Integration and Event-Driven Design Patterns to Accelerate Intelligent Automation

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Abstract

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation highlights the modern integration design patterns for intelligent automation. Coping with operating at faster cycle times in a highly complex, distributed fashion that is also resilient means there is an intense dependency on being very good at many facets of integration, including API management, API gateways, data movement, and modern ways broadcasting data as events. But that isn't enough. When integration involves connecting across distributed systems, many organizations package common methods of interactions and connectivity into integration design patterns. An integration architecture team will typically maintain these patterns, making changes as dictated by new business and technology requirements. When the new design patterns are mapped to existing integration platforms, gaps in functionality are identified and may require the integration teams to implement new types of integration software.

The two most common integration design patterns in use today, arguably, are request-response and extract, transform, and load (ETL). With request-response, application logic sends a request to the API of a web service or to an adapter that connects to a database and waits for the response. The endpoint executes the request and returns the results back to the requester. With ETL, jobs are created to schedule the extraction of new data from a source database; the data is transformed to make it compatible with the target data store and loads the newly transformed data into the target. While these integration design patterns continue to be heavily used, integration patterns that are not as commonly adopted are becoming more important and new patterns are emerging. New needs and technologies also advance new design patterns. This is particularly true when the new technologies improve ease of enablement and ongoing management of the pattern. In addition, new architectures aligned with business requirements call for new design patterns. In essence, rethinking integration design patterns are much more important for several intersecting reasons, including:

• The need to deliver capabilities quickly, even when those capabilities can be complex
• Distributed nature of systems design
• Delivery of capabilities via composition requiring improvements in scalability, application elasticity, and resilience
• Opportunity to harness newer, more transient, and higher volume types of data
• New event-driven styles of application design that need low-latency access to data
• Requirements for automated proactive communications with customers and ecosystems

To illustrate how integration patterns are changing, IDC has identified several modern foundational integration-intensive design patterns along with facts and use cases about why these are relevant. We call the patterns modern because they represent key requirements needed to support today's business strategies. And they are foundational because they are already or will be adopted ubiquitously across enterprises.

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