Lesson154 - Is an ESB Still Relevant Today?

A viewer of Software Architecture Monday posted a question last month asking whether modern system integration should still use an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) to integrate both legacy and modern applications. I thought it was such a great and pertinent question that I decided to do a lesson on answering this question. In this lesson I revisit the role of an ESB and answer the question whether it is still a relevant and effective technique in today's modern world for systems integration.

Reference Links:

[nabiligouba]

Great explanation @mark, being integration specialist, I would say that the day where a company decides that all its applications have "clean interfaces", communicate using same protocol (APIs over http for synchronous, events over any broker ) and discuss using same "language" (data model)... maybe in this case an ESB is not necessary!, orchestration is still needed (we could imagine it implemented in a dedicated microservice)
Even in that case, companies work with partners and SaaS applications so they cannot force them to use same data model...
Esb is still alive ...

[bossgandy]

I wonder if there's any cloud-native ESB type services available in AWS/Azure because most of the processes are shifting to cloud anyway

[kamalbakarim]

Hello mark and thank you for your response. I agree with you that ESB in term of integration can brings many benefits in term of contract and protocols decoupling and also to implement correctly a DDD approach.
What I dislike in older ESB (hub) is the SPOF that brings to architecture and the efforts/costs needed to keep agility/performance in such implementation. I think if we can consider a micro integration approach (something with same ilities as microservice) that could bring all the benefits of ESB and enhance our capabilities in agility/performance and availability. What do you think 🤔 ?