What are micro-integrations?
Micro-integrations are small, lightweight event-driven integration modules that connect enterprise technologies (legacy and SaaS applications, messaging services, databases, files, AI agents etc.) to an event-driven distribution layer, so they can exchange information in real-time.
Micro-integrations are to integration and connectivity what microservices are to application architectures: they decompose a monolithic integration flow into smaller, more manageable, purpose-built components.
A micro-integration includes a source or target connector which establishes data flow between an event distribution layer such as an event broker or an event mesh and some other source or target system. They can (but do not always) also include one or more functions that modify the message’s content such as payload transformation, data enrichment/validation, or header modification.
Unlike synchronous integrations which can become complex, fragile and hard to change because of potential impact to other systems and integrations, micro-integrations focus on specific, narrowly defined tasks or processes so they are easier to design and change without impact to any other systems because the effect and risk of the change is localized.
Micro-integrations are a critical part of event-driven integration, along with an event mesh for distribution, and an event portal that helps people discover, reuse, lifecycle manage, govern and generate code for events as the key data integration point.
Are micro-integrations related to microservices?
Yes, micro-integrations are related to microservices, but they serve distinct purposes. You could say that micro-integrations are to integration what microservices are to application architecture.
For decades, enterprise IT revolved around monolithic “enterprise applications” that each handled an entire area of responsibility, such as customer resource management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), salesforce automation (SFA) and supply chain management (SCM), just to name a few. In recent years, almost every enterprise has shifted toward the modular approach of building applications out of small, lightweight, purpose-specific pieces of software called “microservices.”
In much the same way, micro-integrations represent the decomposition of monolithic integration solutions into lightweight, modular components responsible for letting various endpoints – enterprise applications, IoT devices and microservices themselves – exchange information.
What’s the difference between a micro-integration and a connector?
A connector in an iPaaS typically provides connectivity to/from some data source or target but not transformation, mapping, masking, orchestration or routing, which are handled by other parts of the integration flow.
A micro-integration includes a source or target ‘connector’ which establishes data flow between an event distribution layer like an event broker or event mesh and some source/target system. It can also (but does not always) include one or more functions that modify the message’s content as it moves on to or off of the event mesh, such as payload transformation, data enrichment/validation, field masking or header modification.
So a micro-integration is more than just a connector, but still only one half of an integration flow – at the source or target end of the equation – and not an entire end-to-end-integration in its own right.
What are the advantages of micro-integrations?
As a key element of event-driven integration, micro-integrations offer the following advantages:
- Greater Agility: Micro-integrations make it easy to change the way applications and services interact with one another, by reusing them and the events they produce in new ways. They perform one function for one source or target application which also makes them easier to change with less effort, risk and potential impact on other systems integrated to this same flow.
- Faster data distribution: Micro-integrations can offer higher performance than traditional integration solutions, while simplifying networking configuration, because they are deployed close to source and target applications. Micro-integrations provide fast streaming capabilities to and from fast data sources/targets such as messaging systems, databases (via CDC), analytics engines and data lakes.
- Better/Easy Scalability: Micro-integrations facilitate scalability in two ways:
First, updates from a source system can be delivered to an almost infinite number of target systems without performance impact by using many target micro-integrations around the event broker/mesh.
Second, you can easily and even dynamically support an increasing amount of information/traffic flowing to or from a single application by deploying more instances of a given micro-integration, i.e. horizontally scaling at the micro-integration level. - More Flexibility: Different technologies can be used at the source or target sides depending on best fit technology, commercial reasons or technology evolution, but still adhere to the same overall integration architecture.