When is Digital Integration Hub needed?

Digital Integration Hub is a robust and flexible approach to manage integrations and modernise legacy systems. In this blog we look at the most common case scenarios in which DIH should be implemented.

Antti Toivanen

24.06.2021

Antti Toivanen

Frends Integration Fellow

A Digital Integration Hub (DIH) is an architectural approach that makes APIs unconnected from the back-end systems. This way, service breaks, un-matched capacity, speed and scalability of the back-end won't prevent an organisation from publishing, for example, internet-facing public APIs.

Imagine if each of your multiple applications are all calling the APIs directly in order to access the data:

  1. First of all, every interaction with the system would create such a load to the back-end systems that eventually one of the legacy systems would not be able to handle the load anymore and fail.
  2. Secondly, in the situation, when you would like to modernise one of the system of record, you would need to modernise all applications, as the system is tightly coupled.

Digital Integration Hub as a strategic approach lets you take the load off your back-end, and enable graceful modernisation of the legacy systems with less time and resources spent.

Why and when Digital Integration Hub is needed?

These are the most common challenges that Digital Integration Hub (DIH) solves in business:

  1. We don't know the volume of API calls that our API shall face.
  2. We want to continue to leverage our on-premise operational systems because our sensitive data cannot be moved to the public cloud.
  3. We want to ensure an infrastructure compatibility when utilising both hybrid and multicloud architectures.
  4. Our system of records of even new line-of-business applications cannot handle the volume of incoming calls from APIs.
  5. Due to the regulations (GDPR), we must isolate and ensure where our date is persisted.
  6. Our services must run 24/7, but our back-end systems have service breaks now and then. As one API may compose the returned data or business function with several back-end systems, the sum of service breaks lead to a terrible overall availability for API.
  7. We want to fully leverage big data and live business intelligence.
  8. We want to start a digital transformation / legacy modernisation project in an organisation.

How Digital Integration Hub solves these challenges?

Digital Integration Hub removes the tight connection between the API and the back-end system by adding a superfast data storage in-between. For example, this is how Digital Integration Hub is implemented with the Frends integration platform:

DIH ski resort example

Here we dive into the case of a ski resort customer, for which a DIH backed mobile application was created. In this app, the data storage is updated via data pumps that pull and push the data at speed and concurrency that the back-end system can handle without causing problems to direct end-users of the back-end system at hand. A ski-resort customer app receives exact temperatures inside a slope (IoT sensor) from API. There can be hundreds of concurrent request from different slopes in the mountain. This temperature data is pumped every few minutes and stored in the Data Storage. The same App can show you the location of the ski-bus - and that data is updated to Data Storage via live APIs. Location is written to memory and may be read directly from there, enabling low latency and high concurrency.

Watch the webinar: The Latest Outlook on a Modern Integration Platform in 2021

The execution engines of APIs, Frends Agents, scale inside containers in a containerization environment ensuring that the API layer won't be a bottleneck. This is optional and chosen only when the volume of API calls is known to be huge. A single Frends Agent can handle easily tens or even hundreds of concurrent API calls. Scaling Agents in containers results in a linear and elastic scaling of API logic capacity.

Conclusion

DIH is a powerful and modern approach to API and digital economy that brings flexibility, faster time-to-market, reduced IT complexity, and scalability. A DIH provides data for real-time business processes, reduces data access delays, reduces the number of API calls. With DIH you can create a common data layer that would allow many business applications to access data from multiple databases. As the result what you get is a modern application architecture wrapped up into a single integration platform that lets you manage and monitor all integration processes across the whole lifecycle.

Worth trying?

Get in touch with us to discuss the API and integration challenges. One of our integration consultants will get back to you to assess your integration case.

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