Integration of heterogeneous IT system landscapes

More and more companies are facing an increasingly heterogeneous system landscape. There are many reasons for this. Old systems are tried and tested and expensive to replace and are therefore operated for as long as possible. At the same time, new systems are being added due to changing requirements. For cost reasons, these new systems are often not in-house developments, but commercial software packages that bring their own data and processing models into the company. New applications do not necessarily have to run within the company, but are increasingly being obtained from the cloud.

Although the system landscape is now becoming more heterogeneous, the efficiency of business processes should not suffer. This essentially means that all these applications must be integrated with one another and content and technological gaps must be bridged.

This training aims to show which concepts and technologies are currently being used to build these bridges. BPMN is an important tool for describing - and ultimately executing - integration processes. Either directly with BPMN Execution Engines or indirectly by mapping these processes to implementation tools such as Apache Camel or an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
In addition to tools such as Camel or ESBs, general architecture concepts relevant to integration, such as messaging patterns or REST architectures, will also be explained. In addition to these architecture topics, the advantages and disadvantages of basic integration technologies such as XML, messaging systems, files or databases are also covered.

Due to social media, big data, data analytics and tweets, data volumes and data streams are increasing massively. In order to meet these new requirements, new messaging systems or platforms need to be incorporated. This training takes a closer look at the open source platform (enterprise messaging system) Apache Kafka and explains the importance of a distributed, scalable and fault-tolerant system.

1. motivation

• Process optimization
• M & A
• Modernization
• Synchronization
• B2B
• Cloud (SaaS)

2. concepts

• Integration layers
• Classification according to latency
• The N2 claim
• The canonical data model
• SOA and integration
• Loose coupling

3. data formats

• Data formats
• JSON
• YAML
• XML
• EDI
• SWIFT
• Misc: ISO 8583 etc.

4. patterns

• File Transfer/ETL
• Databases
• RPC
• Messaging patterns
• Messaging implementation
• Process Manager (Business Process Engines, BPMN)
• REST - architecture concept and use cases 
• Security (Transport/Message Layer Security, OAuth2, ...)
• Reliability
• Integration Platform As A Service (iPaaS)
• Migration Patterns

5. infrastructure

• Today's requirements
• Platforms (Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Java EE, Camel, ...)
• Repositories/Registries
• Monitoring
• Products and open source solutions

6. enterprise messaging system (Apache Kafka)

• Challenges of distributed systems
• Kafka Architecture
• Kafka Topic
• Kafka Messages
• Kafka API's
• Strengths/weaknesses
• Use cases

7. project management

• Requirements
• project managers
• Financing
• Special risks
• Governance

8. strategy

• Integration department
• Standardization (technologies, protocols)
• Standardization of suppliers
• Open source vs product
• In-house development vs product