How can you design an ESB that meets your company's specific needs?

ESB/ Composable architectures/ Integration hubs need to also incorporate factors such as Dependencies on 3rd party and external applications Distribution and volumes of data processing and flows Extent of desired decoupling Reducing lock in and system failure risks Optimising volumes of workload calls to core systems

As with any new business adoption, especially ML or AI, the business must consider the required outcomes. Will this drive change? Will it drive revenue? What are the costs?

Define Business Requirements: Understand and document the specific business requirements that the ESB needs to address. This includes considering the integration needs of various systems, applications, and services. Assess Current Infrastructure: Evaluate your existing IT infrastructure, including applications, databases, and systems. Identify integration points, data formats, protocols, and any existing middleware solutions. Identify Integration Patterns: Determine the integration patterns that best suit your business needs. This may include point-to-point integrations, publish-subscribe patterns, request-reply patterns, etc. Scalability and Performance:

Assessing your requirements is the most difficult part. One should consider the following to reduce gaps: Interviewing users at all levels and understanding how they do their routine jobs is very necessary. While interviewing also ask questions which can improve their working. Business scenarios keep changing so the system design should be so well structured that future requirements can be easily plugged in.

Choosing technology is very tricky. If you have the courage, my first suggestion would be to go for Open source. It’s very affordable, you keep getting upgrades and there is no dearth of free knowledge available. Remember to evaluate and research your platform else you may end up with something which may get abandoned by the open society at a later date. The other advantage is that you control your software and you have the liberty to keep growing it to whatever level you may require.

The architecture should be scale able, efficient, secure and reliable. Keep it as modular as possible and keep in mind OOPS. The whole nature is based on oops and see how efficient and flexible it is.

Howsoever good design, architecture and platform are, these will be zero if not implemented properly. 1. Plan the transition 2. Identify training needs 3. Prepare training materials 4. Train the trainer 5. Chalk out training calendar 6. Run quizzes to check the training quality 7. Get UAT done with clearance from level zero to top level 8. Decide cut-off date 9. Prepare cut over data 10 Go live.

Everything will not be fine the first time. There will be hiccups and surprises, be prepared. Monitoring and responding to glitches asap will go a long way for acceptance of the new solution. Also prepare a list of lessons learned which will allow you to analyse the mistakes and reduce future risks.

While ESB follows certain principles around orchestration, integrating. various interfaces, managing data transport, the manner of configuration and defining rules must consider security such as identification and authentication of its clients and ensure secure connection among others. Similar to other assets in the network that needs scanning and configuration checking, the same should be applied to ESB.

An ESB in most SOA environments is not tenable and could add the following holdouts: 1. In a highly microservice-oriented economy, with the rise of start-ups, and non-standard data, there is a great risk of unmonitored ESB processing data. Especially with no humanly programmed acks between them, due to app proprietary silos. 2. Each app in SOA could add to risk via different version control and implied build cycles if they exist. Adding to this confusion are factors such as diverse app maturity or unretractable segments of legacy infrastructure. The ESB network will grow and become unscalable over time. Large installations need a set of cohesive networked modules on a single platform and data structure.