Integration
December 13th, 2017
Entity services: when microservices are worse than monoliths
Finely-grained, entity-based services seem to be advocated by some pretty authoritative sources. This is unfortunate as they are something of an anti-pattern that can undermine many of the benefits of decomposing an monolith into micoservices.
May 16th, 2017
API management and the return of the enterprise service bus
No self-respecting integration platform is complete without an API management story these days. Is this just a RESTful return of the enterprise service bus?
November 13th, 2016
Handling Protocol Buffers backwards compatibility between versions 2 and 3 using C#
You will inevitably be pushed towards upgrading your protocol buffer messages to Proto3, particularly if you want a client that supports .Net Standard that .Net Core. This can be done, but there are a couple of speed bumps along the way.
August 13th, 2016
PolyBase import and export between Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Blob Storage
SQL Server Polybase makes it easy to load data into Azure SQL Data Warehouse by letting you define groups of files held in Azure blob storage as relational data tables.
March 23rd, 2016
API gateways and the dangers of creeping middleware scope
An API gateway can solve many generic problems in an API infrastructure, but you do need to define a clear remit and protect against creeping scope.
February 1st, 2016
Data design for event-driven architecture: autonomy, encapsulation and ordering
When you’re implementing an event-driven architecture, the design of your events is absolutely critical to realize the benefits of loose coupling.
January 18th, 2016
Informatica Cloud development best practices
Informatica Cloud is a powerful environment but a pretty unforgiving one. Here are some best practices that I have picked up from implementing the platform.
December 12th, 2015
Pragmatic REST: APIs without hypermedia and HATEOAS
If you’re not using HATEAOS then you’re not using REST. That’s true enough, but in many cases adopting HATEOAS doesn’t deliver much value beyond architectural purity.
November 26th, 2015
Comparing nServiceBus and MassTransit: Do we still need .Net integration frameworks?
Both nServiceBus and Mass Transit plugged an important gap in Microsoft’s integration landscape, but do they have a role in a future that is likely to be dominated by diverse technologies and autonomous agile teams?
October 15th, 2015
Using the REST API connector as a data source in Informatica Cloud
It can be pretty straightforward to read REST API resources using Informatica Cloud – so long as you know which levers to pull and your data is in a sympathetic format.
September 27th, 2015
REST APIs don’t need a versioning strategy – they need a change strategy
Change in an API is inevitable. Attempting to manage this change through version numbering usually creates more problems than it solves.
July 2nd, 2015
Comparing Gartner’s cloud integration leaders: Informatica, Dell Boomi and Mulesoft
Gartner’s definition of enterprise integration as a service is so wide that it can be difficult to draw any meaningful comparisons between the platforms in the “leaders” space.
February 8th, 2015
Protocol buffers for .Net: protobuf-net vs protobuf-csharp-port
Google’s open source serialization format is an efficient way of passing platform-independent and version-tolerant data between end-points. Two very different implementations have emerged for .Net.
January 4th, 2015
Why REST is not a silver bullet for service integration
REST is sometimes described as the next “evolutionary step” in service integration. The problem is that REST provides too much of a “dumb pipe” to support genuinely decoupled, fault-tolerant service integration.
December 16th, 2014
Don’t assume message ordering in Azure Service Bus
Azure Service Bus can provide first-in-first-out messaging in theory, but this is not the same as guaranteeing the order in which your messages are processed.