Choosing a reliable software development consulting company will provide any business with application development best practice. Why is it so important? You will use the finished product for many years. Technologies are constantly being improved. Tech giants release new operating systems, update software. Your product should be updatable and easily adaptable to any changes. It is also necessary to configure the system so that it is easy to administer. When you are working for a custom software company, you will work as a part of the team.
In this article, we’ll cover a few key points that differentiate long-term applications from fly-by-night applications.
Integration options
Our application will integrate as a consumer into many external systems. Most of these integrations are not just message processing and routing. There are many complex logical operations such as storing the current state, scheduled executions, and other things. Also, each integration doesn’t have a lot of common logic.
What is the best practice for building this kind of system? Is it necessary to build an all-in-one integration level? It can be a monolithic application with different routes and processors for each integration. Or, you can split the product into many tiny and simple stand-alone applications so that they can be scaled and deployed independently.
What advantages and disadvantages will follow for each decision?
There are quite a few criteria to keep in mind:
- Savings, project cost, operating costs;
- Bandwidth, data volume per unit of time;
- Delay, time of passage of messages;
- Security, data protection;
- Reliability, probability of failures;
- Flexibility and ease of response to changing requirements;
- Process support, flow control, event and error handling.
Criteria of choice
Choosing a good solution architecture depends on the importance of such criteria for a given IT environment. For enterprise applications, an integration platform is often used rather than building integration logic in applications. Such a platform usually includes components for connectivity, message mapping, routing, monitoring / alerting logging, accounting, change management, etc.
Monolithic application:
- The product is easier to deploy. In general, you only need one / a pair of servers.
- The application is easier to control.
- The process could be faster. If the various integration applications need to connect in some way (although this is not specified in your diagram), then they can potentially suffer from the slow over-network protocol. In a monolithic application, everything is inside the same JVM.
- Potentially fewer servers required.
Multiple integration applications architecture
In our understanding, this approach really resembles the architecture of microservices in the field of integration has the following advantages:
- Easier to upgrade different parts of it. If you have a monolithic application, then there is no normal way to update only part of the API. There should be one big update for the whole app. If different integration points are developed by different teams, then the coordination between releases is not obvious.
- As a result of the previous bullet, it would potentially take less time to fix the error at the integration point (from the moment the bug was discovered to the moment the fix was deployed to the production environment). Just commit to one specific integration point and redeploy it.
- If you are experiencing heavy use of a particular integration point, you can easily add another one (or several) on another server. With a monolithic approach, you have to install the entire application to achieve the same effect.
- Easier to test the finished product. If you are running integration / system tests to test your integration point, then you can organize the CI flow so that the system just runs in parallel. Add to that much easier startup and you have a much more flexible flow.
Also read: The Many Advantages of System Performance Monitoring
