Enterprise Integration Summit

Integration Powers Digital Transformation for APIs, Apps, Data & Cloud

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August 26, 2021

A Virtual Summit

Businesses are experiencing a rapid pace of change today. New disruptive companies spring up seemingly overnight, and products and services that were once revolutionary, are quickly becoming obsolete. At the same time, customer experience expectations are constantly rising, with 90% of IT leaders believing they will continue to increase this year.

With this in mind, to be successful in this environment, leaders must innovate much faster and more effectively, while delivering best in class experience to customers. So where can they start?

The shift from legacy IT to cloud-native digital applications infrastructure is already in full swing, and fast approaching a tipping point. Based on the need to innovate fast and deliver superior customer experience, microservices and service mesh are a priority area to deliver a next gen digital architecture and remain competitive.

Four Steps to Begin Welcoming Your Next-Gen Digital Architecture

To get started on their digital transformation journey, leaders are focusing on these four steps:

1.  Drive forward plans to adopt microservices architecture and open APIs, internally and externally. Microservices along with modern integration services are the new way businesses run. APIs are the way microservices and modern integration talks to apps. In order to build next-generation customer and employee experiences, application architectures must adopt this new paradigm.

APIs are and will continue to be a vital part of connectivity, allowing services, applications, businesses and ecosystems to talk to each other and exchange data. The future of enterprise software architecture will be based on microservices, given their power to enable business agility, scalability and reliability to deliver superior customer experience.

2.  Embrace the reality of hybrid cloud. Delivering microservices based architectures that can easily be deployed on hybrid cloud infrastructure is now the prerequisite for enterprise digital initiatives, and service mesh can provide that foundation of a multi-cloud hybrid microservices platform strategy. The traditional API based connectivity has become outdated as it is built on the premises of fixed endpoints and not optimized for the hybrid cloud world where the microservices can be hosted on ephemeral nodes.

Microservices are ideal for a distributed cloud environment, since they can take advantage of cloud services which can spin up new machines in seconds. With automated deployment, a service that’s in demand can be replicated dozens of times in a matter of seconds.

The independent nature of microservices also encourages faster revision cycles. This freedom enables business units to innovate quickly – fail fast – to uncover new opportunities. It also enables complex systems to be decoupled so individual capabilities can evolve at the appropriate pace.

3.  Create new architectural paradigms with containers. Containerization and container orchestration technologies accompany and enable microservices and service mesh and enable API Management platform to cover more ground.

For this to happen, API platforms need to support private traffic between microservices powering modern applications, although the need to support public traffic remains relevant. That’s why incorporating microgateways in addition to API gateways will help segregate concerns for better manageability. API gateways controlling the ingress/egress to the mesh and microgateway controlling and assisting things with the mesh.

In turn, APIs and API Management solutions must also make it easy for IT and business teams to make this transition, incorporating ease-of-use technologies that will let these workers employ methods and tools they already know.

Happily, today’s API Management platforms are evolving in anticipation of an ‘everything-mesh’ revolution. API Management needs to be even closer to the (micro)services. It also needs to be able to expose a new world of networking capabilities to application and business owners. Implementing understandable, usable, and useful service meshes will help in blending business and integration logic.

4.  Redefine modern integration and application architecture. With unified APIM solutions for traditional APIs and service mesh supported by micro gateways and an open architecture, organizations can take part in redefining the future of APIs and microservices solutions for the enterprise.

To transform business operations and accelerate the pace of digital transformation, microservices now provide core ‘building blocks’ for a wide range of digital transformation projects. These enterprises to develop a “built-for-change" platform between partners, platforms and data silos – all expressly designed for today’s purpose and tomorrow’s unanticipated needs.

Microservices also help IT innovate at the speed of business to quickly build or change connected applications faster, powering agility. Enterprises can react to the market faster and improve the overall customer experience. 

Not all APIs require microservices. But when an API request is delivered with microservices, it provides advantages to new projects that need to scale rapidly or evolve quickly. It enables business units to fund and deploy products independently. And it increases the potential for disruptive innovation.

Laying the Groundwork for Your Microservices-Based, Next-Gen Architecture

Companies should do their homework when it comes to the introduction of microservices and service mesh, as they both require security, monitoring, metering and analytics, their instances must also be spawned, orchestrated, secured and managed from the perspective of the applications that use them.

In other words, they must be operationalized so that IT, developers and application owners can account for not only an applications’ capabilities and performance, but also its security, auditability and compliance given the realities of a true enterprise setting.

If these new areas of development are a fit for your organization, begin the movement – take your monolithic architecture and evolve parts of it that need a lot of scale and flexibility into a microservices and service mesh architecture.

With over 15 years of experience in leading enterprise SaaS, cloud, and software product portfolios, Suraj Kumar currently leads global product management, development, architecture, and business development teams at Software AG. In this role, he delivers best-in-class customer solutions for digital transformation and innovation.