Event-based integration made simple — without getting rid of legacy IT

We live in a real-time world. From checking social media feeds to messaging family, making near-instant payments on the go or connecting global business networks, many of the things we’ve come to take for granted are made possible by “events”.

Events are occurrences or messages that are exchanged between different components or services within a distributed system. These could include “order placed,” “user registered,” or even simpler, “status change.”

Complexities of event-based integration

Event-based integration is asynchronous: systems are loosely coupled, and components communicate and react to events rather than directly invoking each other’s functionality in a traditional request-response manner.

For example, you could choose to trigger an event when a payment is successfully processed. The event carries information about the payment amount, transaction ID, and the associated customer or order. Components responsible for financial processing or order fulfillment can then subscribe to this event to initiate further actions.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to integrate events with the synchronous mechanisms that underpin most of today’s existing business processes.

What’s more, there are many modern scenarios where using an event makes more sense: synchronous mechanisms (such as REST APIs) can generate a lot of unnecessary polling traffic to collect status updates. The sender can spend hours making queries and waiting for a response from the receiver without obtaining any update from those asks.

We hear this often from our customers: with an increasing number of deployment options that span beyond on-premises to the cloud and hybrid models, they’re struggling with customization to provide back-end integration with asynchronous patterns. It could be a whole simpler.

Need for hybrid integration

Most organizations in business today have extensive legacy systems. They don’t want to rip and replace; they need to extend and modernize their existing solution. That would mean being able to orchestrate, automate, and manage end-to-end workflows, event-based or not.

Amplify Integration is a purpose-built integration solution that your teams already using Amplify Platform can use to extend and integrate your API management – including business users.

Available both on-premises and in the cloud, Amplify Integration offers an automated approach to orchestration and message transformation, allowing you to integrate all your applications and support additional patterns like events.

Amplify Integration can:

• Manage async integration and take action on events
• Transform an API call into an event
• Connect to event-based systems like Kafka (an open-source streaming platform designed for handling large-scale data feeds) thanks to an extensive set of out-of-the-box connectors

Whether the trigger is a message from Amazon SQS, a webhook, or an API call, Amplify Integration can map the content of events, split up large payloads, or publish events.

But instead of telling you, let’s show you what this solution can do in a real-world scenario.

Event-based integration with Amplify Integration

A French governmental agency we worked with needed to improve its invoicing process. Previously, involved parties weren’t notified when a change to the invoice was made, so they had to manually poll for changes, generating a lot of unnecessary traffic.

The agency used Amplify Integration to regularly query the backend system, retrieving a list of all invoices for which changes had been made.

That list was then integrated with Kafka – an easy drag-and-drop process defined once thanks to pre-built connectors – which generated an event for each changed invoice. Finally, Amplify Integration would pick up each of those events and notify the relevant parties.

By doing this, the agency eliminated 75% of unnecessary API traffic.

Amplify Integration can also help automate file-based data integrations for managed file transfer – learn more here.

We look forward to continuing to explore Amplify Integration’s possibilities with our customers. Let’s reduce the complexity and unburden your teams, uncovering new revenue opportunities from event-based integration.