The Promise of ESB Technology without the Overhead

The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a model for inter-application communication that was developed in the era of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Today when people mention the term ESB, the first things that typically come to mind are long, expensive development cycles, inflexibility, and complexity. While designed with good intentions, most legacy ESB technology implementations grew into overloaded business logic monsters, causing performance issues, especially when attempting to deal with large volumes of data. What people ultimately want from an ESB technology solution is a high-speed, agile, and scalable infrastructure that is ubiquitous, able to work with modern data and services both on-premises and in the cloud.

At the heart of legacy ESB technology are the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which are both becoming outdated, designed at a time when the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was mainstream. In the new enterprise IT world of the SMACT (social, mobile, analytics, cloud and things), especially when it comes to big data, message-based ESB technology begins looking more like a horse and buggy than a modern approach to application and data integration. The application and data worlds have evolved and the requirements have converged. In that evolution the ESB technology is no longer a viable option.

no_esbSnapLogic’s answer to low-latency application and data integration lies in a high-speed, guaranteed delivery system that works across disparate sources, whether on-premise or in the cloud. Designed for high-speed data streaming, transformation and delivery, SnapLogic’s Ultra Pipelines are designed to meet the demands of today’s modern systems, supporting virtually any type of interface or data representation (JSON, XML, SOAP, REST, etc.) with low-latency, real-time processing, and guaranteed data delivery.

SnapLogic has removed the heavy lifting typically found in ESB technology systems and implementations, moving the user from a long and costly development paradigm into a quick configuration paradigm. Whether your requirement is event-based, real-time, streaming or scheduled batch-oriented data integration, SnapLogic’s modern, JSON-centric, RESTful platform has a clear advantage over traditional ESB solutions that were built for last generation’s structured application and data management challenges.

Ultra-PipelinesGraphic_NoBG (1)But what about microservices? As the enterprise continues to migrate more toward increasingly granular services, all the more reason to adopt an agile, modern integration platform that is equipped to deal with evolutionary changes. SnapLogic’s concept of the ESB rests on a system that was designed from the ground up to deliver the ultimate in flexibility, agility, and elasticity.  As EMA Research recently noted:

Even as pre-built Snaps eliminate work cycles and manual processes related to data integration, SnapLogic Ultra Pipelines accelerates data delivery. This parallel approach to addressing the twin challenges of big data integration and real-time processing reinforces SnapLogic’s position as a leader in the data integration and iPaaS space.”

Randy Hamilton is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and technologist who writes periodically about industry related topics including the cloud, big data and iOT.  Randy has held positions as Instructor (Open Distributed Systems) at UC Santa Cruz and has enjoyed positions at Basho (Riak NoSQL database), Sun Microsystems, and Outlook Ventures, as well as being one of the founding members and VP Engineering at Match.com.

Category: Product
Topics: ESB REST XML

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