What benefits can you gain from using a message broker for system integration?

1 What is a message broker?

A message broker is a software application that acts as an intermediary between the components of a system that need to communicate with each other. The message broker receives messages from the senders, transforms them if needed, and routes them to the appropriate receivers based on predefined rules and policies. The message broker can also store, filter, prioritize, and monitor the messages, as well as handle errors and failures. A message broker can support various messaging patterns, such as point-to-point, publish-subscribe, request-reply, and event-driven.

3 How to choose a message broker?

When choosing a message broker for system integration, there are many factors to consider. Compatibility should be checked to ensure the message broker is compatible with the components that you want to integrate, and supports the data formats, communication protocols, and platforms that they use. Performance should also be assessed to ensure it can handle the volume, velocity, and variety of messages your system generates or consumes, as well as meet the quality requirements of your system. Additionally, functionality should be evaluated to determine if it offers the necessary features for your system integration such as messaging patterns, message transformation, message routing, message storage, message filtering, message prioritization, error handling, delivery guarantees, monitoring and alerting. Lastly, cost should be taken into account to ensure it fits your budget and business model with a clear and transparent pricing structure. The total cost of ownership should also be considered including initial investment, maintenance costs, upgrades and licensing fees.

4 How to use a message broker?

Using a message broker for system integration involves several steps, such as designing your system architecture and selecting the message broker that meets your needs. Additionally, you need to implement the components, write the code that enables them to send and receive messages, and test the performance, scalability, and security of your system integration. Lastly, you need to deploy your system integration and manage it in the target environment. All of these steps are necessary for ensuring that messages are delivered correctly and reliably.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?