Integration Patterns
Routers, translators, splitters, aggregators and dead letter channels.
3 to work through
-
advanced
A financial-data aggregator normalises hundreds of external bank APIs behind one interface. Where should the abstraction stop, and what happens when a provider does not fit?
2 min answer -
advanced
A travel platform aggregates supply from hundreds of partners with wildly different protocols, latencies and reliability. Which integration patterns apply, and what is the most common structural mistake?
2 min answer -
advanced
Review this integration layer. An enterprise platform of SAP's shape defines a canonical Customer with 140 fields. Sixty source systems map into it and forty consumers read from it. Onboarding a new partner takes six weeks, most of it mapping. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you keep?
3 min answer
6 terms in this topic
Canonical Data Model
One shared representation that every producer maps into and every consumer reads from, trading N×M translations for a single model that grows monoton…
practiceCapability Flag
Representing genuine differences between integrated partners as explicit declared capabilities, rather than as variant fields in a shared canonical model.
conceptIntegration Coupling Modes
The distinct dimensions along which two systems can be coupled — temporal, format, location, semantic — each with its own remedy.
patternMessage Router
A component that inspects a message and forwards it to one of several destinations based on its content or headers.
patternMessage Translator
A component converting a message between two systems' formats, so neither has to adopt the other's model.
practiceProvider Capability Matrix
An explicit per-provider record of which normalised capabilities are genuinely supported, which are approximated and which are unavailable - publishe…
Neighbouring topics
API & Integration
General material on integrating systems through contracts.
REST Design
Resources, uniform methods, status codes and statelessness.
GraphQL
Client-specified queries, N+1 resolution and query-cost control.
gRPC APIs
Contract-first RPC, generated clients and protobuf compatibility rules.
Webhooks
Push callbacks, signature verification, ordering and at-least-once delivery.
API Versioning
URL, header and account-pinned versioning, and who carries the burden.
Backward Compatibility
Which changes are safe, and how to make breakage a build failure.
Contract Testing
Verifying what consumers actually rely on, without a shared environment.
API Documentation
OpenAPI as a machine-checked contract rather than as prose.
Rate Limiting
Algorithms, shared counters, and signalling rejection properly.
Idempotency Keys
Client-generated keys stored atomically with the operation they guard.
Pagination & Filtering
Offset versus cursor, stable ordering and unbounded result sets.
API Error Handling
Error shapes, retryability signals and machine-readable causes.
Event-Driven Integration
Publishing facts rather than commands, and versioning event schemas.
Message Formats
JSON, Protobuf, Avro — schema evolution and payload economics.
Schema Registry
Enforcing compatibility on events the way CI enforces it on code.
Legacy Integration
Reaching systems that cannot change, without importing their model.
Partner & B2B Integration
External contracts, onboarding, sandboxes and long deprecation windows.
APIs as Products
Ownership, lifecycle, deprecation policy and developer experience.