Why you should care about Cloud-Native Middleware

The IT world is moving forward fast. I wrote about Microservices and whether that spells the death of the Enterprise Service Bus and other middleware a year ago. This month, I published an article as a “follow-up” to discuss how relevant microservices, containers and a cloud-native architecture is for middleware.

It is unbelievable how fast enterprises of all sizes are moving forward with these topics! Docker, Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes are a few of the key technologies and frameworks you have to take a deeper look at to realize a cloud-native architecture. But there is much more...

Key Takeaways:

• A cloud-native architecture enables flexible and agile development, deployment and operations of all kinds of software
• Modern middleware leverages containers, microservices and a cloud-native architecture
• Packaging and isolation in containers is not enough, there are many more concepts to understand and leverage

Modern Cloud-Native Middleware (e.g. iPaaS, iSaaS)

In summary, middleware components

• Require agility and flexibility
• Control and leverage other microservices
• Have to support microservice characteristics itself (containers, CI / CD, elastic scalability, etc.) to fit into a cloud-native architecture and to allow quick changes

No matter if you think about on premise or cloud-native application integration for the integration specialist, iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) for the citizen integrator or iSaaS (Integration Software as a Service) for the business user, you will probably leverage microservices, containers and cloud-native concepts such as automatic scaling, cluster orchestration, service discovery or "fail-fast" design patterns.

Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP)

Different user roles need to leverage different tools to integrate applications, services and APIs for their specific need. A key for success is that all these integration and business services have to work together across different platforms in a hybrid world with on premise and cloud-native deployments.

Another important aspect is that you can transfer content across different platforms and infrastructures (e.g. local development environment, on premise hardware or different cloud providers). You have to leverage microservices and containers to realize this without huge efforts.

Gartner calls this a Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP). In a hybrid integration architecture, different components share metadata, one single IDE and consolidated operations management. Out-of-the-box integration capabilities with API Management components (i.e. API gateway and portal) are also very important for agile development, deployment and operations. Besides, you also have to combine this with process integration to allow human interaction in long running business processes.

Microservices, Containers and Cloud-Native Architectures Do NOT Fit into Every Project…

… but they have a huge influence on our thinking about IT architectures. In many new projects these concepts absolutely make sense and create a lot of benefits such as flexible development, deployment and operations.

Think about the trade-offs and leverage the parts of a cloud-native architecture which make sense for your project. Modern middleware will leverage microservices, containers and cloud-native architectures! No matter if you take a look at Integration, API Management, Event Processing, Streaming Analytics, Business Process Management or any other kind of on-premise or cloud middleware.

Full Article at "Voxxed"

This post is just a summary of my extensive article published at Voxxed in June 2016. Read "Microservices, Containers and Cloud-Native Architectures for Middleware" to learn much more about this topic and the enormous (and still growing) variety of tools and frameworks available on the market.

As always I appreciate your feedback...