Simple is not easy
#esb#talend#api#devops#integration#architecture

Comparison of ESB solutions popular on the CIS market

Overview of popular ESB solutions: Talend, Mule, Red Hat Fuse, and WSO2 for choosing an integration bus for your project.

  • Why an ESB in a Project: the Technical Side of the Question
  • We'll send you the materials you need or a commercial proposal
  • ESB Buses: a Brief Overview of Capabilities, Pros, and Cons
  • Red Hat Fuse

  1. Part 2: System Characteristics 27.9.2021

  2. We examine the functionality and interfaces of ESB systems popular on the CIS market: Talend, Mule, Red Hat Fuse, and WSO2.

  3. Why an ESB in a Project: the Technical Side of the Question ESB Buses: a Brief Overview of Capabilities, Pros, and Cons Talend Mule Red Hat Fuse WSO2 Summary: How to Choose an ESB System for Your Project

  4. We continue our series of articles about ESB systems popular on the CIS market. In the previous article, we looked at how the ESB layer components are implemented in Talend, Mule, Red Hat Fuse, and WSO2: studio, message brokers, monitoring, and logging.

  5. Now let's take a closer look at what each of these systems is, what their interfaces look like, and what their inherent pros and cons are for integration development and support. In addition, we will share our own impressions from implementing each of these systems.

Why an ESB in a Project: the Technical Side of the Question

One of the most common objections to using an ESB layer in a company or project architecture is that independent systems can be connected without intermediaries.

It is enough to develop an integration module in one of these systems or use an API, for example.

Let's look at these options in more detail.

The first option is an integration module in one of the systems.

As a rule, its development is delegated to the team that is directly responsible for developing that system.

For such a team, integration development is not a core task and comes with risks such as making non-obvious integration mistakes, spending much more time than planned, or making architectural errors.

In addition, the development team will need to build wrappers around the system to monitor integration health. That is a difficult and substantial task.

You need not only to develop an integration that works without failures, but also to give the support team clear procedures for handling the failures that may still occur. And even if the integration works here and now, there is no guarantee that it will work tomorrow. Nor is there any guarantee that the development team will learn about a broken integration before the customer comes to them with a complaint: "My data exchange is not working."

The second option is data transfer through an API interface or, for example, GraphQL.

There is a nuance here: the API that the system uses to exchange data with the outside world is passive.

The system can only respond to requests by exposing data externally or changing it at the initiative of another system. As a result, the two integrated systems will wait for each other's initiative to exchange information (with API, this is unavoidable).

For the transfer to happen, a third player must be introduced: an active system, that is, in practice, a data bus (ESB). In the ideal case, this setup should be supplemented with webhooks in the master system, meaning the system that serves as the data source.

They will trigger data change requests in the target systems as soon as the data changes in the master system.

ESB Buses: a Brief Overview of Capabilities, Pros, and Cons

Let's take a closer look at four ESB systems popular on the CIS market that the kt.team team works with:

Talend

, Mule, Red Hat Fuse, and WSO2. To illustrate this article, we recorded short videos where you can see what the systems' interfaces look like and how integration development works. Talend Talend is a product of the French company of the same name, now registered in the United States, which entered the market in 2006. On the official website, Talend is positioned as the "first commercial open-source solution for integration development."

Perhaps because Talend was a pioneer in its field, it still has a more archaic interface than other buses today.

Pros

  1. Almost all of the paid version's functionality can be implemented with open-source tools. The studio includes a huge number of ready-made components, and it also allows new ones to be developed.

  2. Thanks to clear and comprehensive documentation, getting started with Talend is easy.

  3. In practice, all common actions and questions are already covered in the documentation.

  4. In addition, a developer community has grown around Talend: on the forum, they discuss how to work with the system, deployment options, and the implementation of individual features.

  5. If questions arise during the process, you can easily turn to the collective knowledge of the community.

Cons

In addition to the archaic interface, the drawbacks include

Talend

includes a fairly complex mechanism for creating subroutines.

If you want to split off a part of a job (a small program that performs a specific task) and turn it into a subroutine that you can call from several places in the main job, you will need to spend a lot of time learning the studio, especially if a business analyst with limited programming knowledge (a so-called citizen developer) will work with the system. Git is not included in the free version of Talend, but you can connect it yourself.

The project structure in the system makes things more difficult: a project consists of atomic jobs that are not visually connected to each other, instead of a file tree. Git is built into the paid version, but it runs in the background, so you do not control it.

It is also worth noting that working with Git in the paid version essentially means every change is committed automatically.

The same job cannot be edited from two computers at the same time, only opened read-only.

Add to this a rather complex mechanism for creating custom components, and you get a system that is fairly difficult for users and has a high entry barrier for development.

At the level of data transfer lines between elements, Talend offers flexible configuration.

This looks like an advantage, but in practice it is also the system's drawback. A business analyst will find it difficult to understand object transformations.

The logic of how lines work is not obvious: to understand the program's behavior, you have to take into account the asynchronous operation of those very lines.

In Summary

Talend is undoubtedly a powerful tool even in the free version, but you can fully appreciate that only after getting used to its logic.

Mule

  1. The product is now owned by Salesforce.

  2. The first references to it can be found around 2006: that was when

  3. Mason gained popularity, and he founded MuleSource (MuleSoft since 2009), headquartered in San Francisco.

  4. The product name is explained as follows: Mule, which translates from English as "mule," does the "donkey work" for developers (from the English donkey work).

  5. That is exactly what developers do when they write code for system integration.

  6. Anypoint Platform helps developers quickly configure interactions between different applications, data, and devices using APIs. In March 2018, Salesforce acquired MuleSoft for $6.5 billion, the company's most expensive acquisition at the time

  7. Marc Benioff's. Mule supports Salesforce's ecosystem mission to move business into the cloud.

Pros

  1. The interface is built on Eclipse and has intuitive elements and components.

  2. Many components that are installed by default during job assembly do not need adjustment.

  3. Anypoint Studio makes it easy and efficient to control all APIs in the orchestration by key parameters and metrics: the initial design of the future API, access control, logging, and server statistics.

  4. Anypoint Exchange lets you maintain a catalog, search for various artifacts (API, code snippets, templates, examples, connectors, etc.), and share them.

  5. All of these artifacts can be made available publicly or within the organization.

  6. Cloud services are sufficient for creating integrations.

  7. Thus, Mule fits the new iPaaS concept, short for integration platform as a service.

  8. The ESB concept implies deploying the entire infrastructure from scratch on your own servers.

  9. However, many companies today use cloud services.

  10. You can build your infrastructure with iPaaS much faster and better than developing it from scratch.

  11. The entire project can be viewed at the file level, which makes it possible to use Git to manage project changes.

Cons

  1. The free Mule trial is valid for 30 days.

  2. If you plan to continue using the bus, you need to purchase a license during this time,

  3. License cost is calculated individually.

  4. The Community edition is very limited. If you do not have strong Java expertise, it is better to consider purchasing the paid version right away.

We'll curate materials for your task

clients@kt.team Telegram @kt_team_blog

We'll reply within 30 minutes and send relevant cases, diagrams, or analyses tailored to your context.

In Summary

Mule is part of the Salesforce ecosystem, which is undoubtedly a plus. The platform's tools make it possible to work in the iPaaS model. The trial and Community versions imply additional costs for licenses and personnel with the required qualifications.

Red Hat Fuse

A Red Hat product built on the Camel library. The first references to the platform date back to around 2008. Of all the solutions covered in this article, Red Hat Fuse is the most developer-oriented. On the one hand, this provides virtually unlimited customization options. On the other, the entry barrier for analysts is fairly high.

Pros

  1. Good integration with the Red Hat infrastructure.

  2. If your company already uses other Red Hat solutions, Fuse will easily fit into the existing infrastructure.

  3. Fuse uses the same licensing model as the entire Red Hat product line: you pay for paid support only if you want it.

  4. The entire project can be viewed at the file level, which makes it possible to use Git to manage project changes.

Cons

A weak component set forces you to write a large amount of additional code and connect many solutions as Java libraries. There is no surrounding tooling for API management, a component store, and other related products that competitors have. This also creates a sense of incompleteness.

In Summary

Red Hat Fuse is a tool with virtually unlimited customization options, but a high entry barrier. It does not include additional tools that would simplify integration development.

WSO2

The WSO2 platform is a lightweight and fast solution for integrating information systems. The first references to the product date back to 2005. It supports all protocols and offers a wide range of connectors to different systems.

Pros

  1. The Apache 2.0 license allows you to deploy WSO2 and start evaluating it.

  2. The platform is fully open source.

  3. Buying a subscription does not affect the product's functionality and is needed only to keep licensing compliant. WSO2's advantages include a fairly low entry barrier and a pleasant interface.

  4. All platform functionality is available in the base version.

  5. The ability to build Docker images makes it possible to use Kubernetes as the orchestrator.

  6. Integration support is provided through related products, such as API Management.

  7. The entire project can be viewed at the file level, which makes it possible to use Git to manage project changes.

Cons

It is hard to identify any pronounced drawbacks. WSO2 is a well-balanced product, though not as powerful as Mule.

In Summary

WSO2 is a platform with a pleasant interface and a well-designed mechanism for integration support. It is less powerful than Mule.

Summary: How to Choose an ESB System for Your Project

  1. Almost any of the buses reviewed can be used in either a paid or free version.

  2. But each of the products covered in this review has its own characteristics, which define the optimal areas for its use.

  3. If your goal is to save on license acquisition, Fuse is the best fit.

  4. However, be prepared to spend on building many solutions and wrappers from scratch.

  5. For a quick start, the following are a good fit

Talend

or Mule. Your choice may be influenced by license cost, which depends on the usage profile of the systems. Talend prices by the number of developers, while Mule prices by the amount of resources used. WSO2 offers the best balance of functionality and ease of license cost calculation. As an IT integrator, we can work with any of these solutions and are ready to advise you on choosing the bus that best fits your specific needs.

Contacts

Let's Discuss Your Project

Leave your current contact details and describe your task. We will come back with clarifying questions and a proposal for the next step.

By clicking the button, you accept the offer and grant consent to the processing of personal data.

YouTube

All videos
4:19 Cloud Native ESB / Flexibility and Speed for Your Business 14:04 Buses — a key element of quality architecture | Andrey Putin 3:22 Synchronicity, Asynchronicity and Where Buses Fit In | KT.Team | Andrey Putin