Somewhere there’s a post waiting to be finished, but for lack of time, we’ll have to do with this.
My favorite ESB pattern which I would gladly recommend to anyone who asks looking for advise on how to reap the benefits is this, and the reference to Art of War is intentional: inform the competition how successful your ESB implementation is, and avoid using it yourself.
It invariably leads you down the road to Product Oriented Architecture, the exact opposite of where you want to go. No technical reason for that, just the very idea that you can check mark a way to develop software by merely installing a product, which ends up being the fire for every project moth.
But this one took my by surprise. A well articulated article on the ESB.delete pattern, coming from International Busybee Machines:
ESB-oriented architecture is inherently flawed in that it builds connectivity no one might ever want to use. The business does not derive additional value until systems connect to each other and are working together. Until then, the ESB is just cost with no benefit. It might make the IT department feel good because they have built something, but it will not make the business feel any better, because the business is not accomplishing anything it couldn’t have already accomplished without the ESB. The ESB becomes the equivalent of a human appendix for the IT department, a vestigial organ within the topology of deployed applications.
Of all the unlikey places …