The Fleet of Buses

The message bus, information bus,   and enterprise service bus concepts are popular, and now old enough, that most large organizations find they have an entire fleet of such buses. Complicating matters is the fact that they tend to be heterogeneous in version and vendor and much of this middleware is really embedded legacy application infrastructure that cannot be easily changed. So how do you modernize your fleet of old buses?

1 ) Federate: Get them talking to one another so that they benefit from the network effect that returns greater value as more endpoints are inter-connected

2) Accelerate: Get rid of the road bumps and bottlenecks slowing down the real-time flow of information. Modern data movement is much lower latency, globally distributed, with active/active  replication into in-memory datagrids and distributed cache.

3) Rejuvenate: Remodel a few key flagship implementations to take advantage of the new world of streaming big data, real-time analytics, mobile sensors, M2M, etc.

Easier said than done you’re saying, and of course you are right. However, it’s not the technology that is holding us back anymore. The world of the message broker has never been more open and interoperable. AMQP, Websockets, JMS, REST, Web Services, XML, JSON, Virtualization and Cloud Computing all combine to make the task of building a multi-tenent multi-protocol federated message bus a reality.

This is a 12 min video demonstration of a set of off the shelf components easily tied together to show seamless real-time communications between IBM WebSphere MQ, a RabbitMQ AMQP 0-9-1 Broker, any Java Messaging Service (JMS) server, and a Web Streaming application tunneling through standard HTTP. A Solace Systems 3260 Appliance and Layer 7 Technologies SecureSpan Gateway are the key components integrating the other systems together.