An Integration is a logical unit to transfer data between two or more endpoints, it may include some transformation so the contents can be read and understood by the receiver at the destination endpoint.
Generally, the data being transferred is called payload or message, the source endpoint is called the sender, and the destination endpoint is the receiver.
Conceptually, an integration should not be involved in manipulating the data, it should not make changes to the data, on the contradiction, an integration may complement the data by adding related information using lookups, or it may change date and number formatting, and so on..
Integrations may sometimes have some logic related to routing the incomings messages to different destinations, or even to discard the incoming messages completely, for that, the integration may transform the data to an intermediate format either to route the messages or to make it easier transforming the data to the different destinations, you can read more about connecting diverse systems here
An essential part of the integration is to manage and to provide the communication methods with the endpoints, the integration may involve in encrypting/decrypting messages, adding some authorization information when reading from the source endpoints or writing to the destination endpoints.
Integrations can be synchronous or asynchronous, in synchronous integrations, the source endpoint can be called the requester, and in this case, the integration must perform fast enough to respond within the timeout of the communication channel established by the requester, so that the requester can receive the response back from the integration that may include data (new message) or only the status of the integration (completed successfully or failed).
Asynchronous integrations are triggered by events, such as receiving files in a given file location, HTTP request, a scheduler, or any other event source, in such integrations, they may take longer time to execute, the communication channel can be closed immediately after receiving the data from the source endpoint, and no response is required in this kind of integrations as the requester does not expect to receive any immediately.
This is a basic and simple explanation of the integration’s concept, integrations can get more complicated based on their functionalities and the requirements.
No matter how an integration is complicated, or what platform the integration is running on, it is still following this basic concept.
In this blog, we will try to show different types of integrations and their applications.
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