Messaging and Microservices the Forgotten Art

Today’s world is filled with microservices which were the bright shiny toy a few years ago. The ability to take a monolithic application and break it down into small easily updated pieces which could bring updates to life in days or minutes vs months or even years. Lets be clear without microservices we would not be seeing the boom of digital transformations that are happening today. 

With the excitement of microservices and taking these huge applications and breaking them up, along the way messaging became “forgotten” in most cases leading to issues such as:

• Lack of guaranteed delivery
• Additional complexity for retry logic
• Spaghetti Code (Wait what? Wasn't this a no no years ago?)

So now that we realize that we left messaging out all this time, how does it fit in? Well adding messaging will give you many advantages:

• Guaranteed delivery which means the calling service no longer has to worry about or wait for processing
• Formatting which allows different systems to consume data in the format it requires. 
• Publish and Subscribe allows systems to take advantage of data that is required for them and ignore data that is not. 
• With a messaging system, consumers can be added and removed quickly. 

Well now we see what messaging brings to the table. How does TIBCO help? TIBCO allows you to do the following:

• Use the right tool for the right job (Web, Pub/Sub, Streaming)
• Use a combination of proprietary vs open source, TIBCO supports it all
• Use messaging where it makes sense whether its on premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid approach TIBCO does it

TIBCO started out in the messaging space and has refined its approach to be uniquely able to support the following:

• Apache Kafka for streaming data for consumption or analysis
• TIBCO Enterprise Messaging Service (EMS) which is based off of the JMS standards
• TIBCO FTL which enables high speed messaging when it matters most
• TIBCO eFTL which provides mobile and websocket connectivity
• Eclipse Mosquito for IOT connectivity
• Apache Pulsar for streaming and application connectivity

Now that we understand the need for messaging and what TIBCO does for it, it is really simple to bring messaging back to our microservices with ease. The next time you write a microservice that can benefit from messaging whether it's from a device, a mainframe, or a web interface messaging can be the missing piece of the equation when it comes to “How do I make this Simple?”. 

I hope this has been helpful for you and if you would like to see how TIBCO can help you with your messaging and integration needs please feel free to to visit us at www.tibco.com