I love APIs but I still need lightweight integration capabilities

msebai
Participant II

Our architecture lacks centralized middleware layer. We're about to launch our API program with prime focus on B2B use cases. Some of our backend systems expose SOAP services, others are exposed over JMS and in some cases we require direct access to RDBMS.

How do we address such integration problem? From architecture and security perspectives, is it good practice to solve this on the API layer? Or do we need to invest in lightweight ESB technology?

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1 REPLY 1

Not applicable

You should ask what you mean with integration? Of course, in the world of APIs, you need to connect services together, but you do that in the context of either delivering an experience API, or in the context of some new internal, perhaps (micro-)services you are building. A good API layer allows you to chain APIs together, as Apigee does. Many of our customers build out experience APIs that call other APIs (a pattern that Netflix popularized).

But in addition, as you build new services, you will probably code calling of other services, rather than depend on some centralized “integration middleware built on a bus architecture, emphasizing connectors".

You need to manage the APIs, not integration.