What is enterprise integration and what patterns are used?

Question

Accepted Answer

**Enterprise integration** — connecting disparate systems within an organization.

**Integration patterns:**
- **Point-to-point:** Direct connections between systems.
  - Simple but scales poorly (n*(n-1)/2 connections).

- **Hub-and-spoke:** Central hub routes messages.
  - Reduces connections to n, but hub is a SPOF.

- **Message broker:** Asynchronous decoupled messaging.
  - Kafka, RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus.

- **Enterprise Service Bus (ESB):** Message routing + transformation.
  - MuleSoft, Apache Camel, WSO2.

**Middleware technologies:**
- **ESB:** SOAP/REST transformation, routing, orchestration.
- **iPaaS:** Cloud-native integration (MuleSoft, Dell Boomi).
- **API Gateway:** Centralized entry point.

**Best practices:**
- Use async messaging for loose coupling.
- Implement idempotency for reliability.
- Centralize logging and monitoring.
- Version contracts for backward compatibility.

Systems Analyst: What is enterprise integration and what patterns are used?