Today, we are proud to announce the public beta launch of the Orbital Bus open source project. The Orbital Bus is a distributed Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) intended to make it easier for developers to implement smart, reusable, loosely coupled services. We believe that a peer-to-peer mesh of lightweight integration nodes provide a much more robust and flexible ESB architecture than the traditional hub/spoke approach. Please check out our public repository and documentation.
I have been working in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and with Enterprise Service Bus (ESB’s) for the majority of my career. I can’t even count how many debates I’ve been in on the value of implementing an ESB and how a hub/spoke architecture is more sustainable than point-to-point integrations. In fact, for a number of years, I took the architectural benefits of an ESB for granted.
By 2013, I was starting to see a pattern of large enterprise clients struggling to adopt SOA not for architectural or technology reasons, but for organizational and cultural reasons. I came to the realization that while ESB’s were being sold as bringing about a certain type of architectural rigor, it could only do that if the organization was very hierarchical and centralized. The ESB is really not well suited for an IT organization made up of more distributed teams and governance structures.
We thought of a better way to solve the real-time integration problem. With the help of some funding from NRC’s IRAP program, we started development of the Orbital Bus in 2015. The goal was to solve some of the major shortcomings that we see in traditional ESB’s:
Single Point of Failure – An ESB creates a single point of failure, as all common integrations must pass through it. Enterprises spend a significant amount of money to improve the availability of their ESB infrastructures (e.g., hardware redundancy, DR sites, clustering). What if the responsibility of translation and routing was pushed out to the edges to where the service providers are hosted? There would be no point of failure in the middle. The availability of each service would purely be dictated by the service provider and the lightweight integration node sitting in front of it, which means one node going down wouldn’t impact the rest of the ecosystem.
Implementation Timelines and Cost – ESB’s take a long time and a lot of money to stand up. A lot of effort is needed to design the architecture so it’s future proof and robust enough for the entire enterprise. And then there’s the cost of the infrastructure, software licenses, and redundancy. Never mind the cost of bringing in external expertise on whichever platform is being implemented. What if the platform actually promoted more organic growth? Each node is lightweight and could be stood up with no additional network zone or infrastructure. Developers will be able to build decoupled interfaces between handful of systems in a matter of days rather than months. And instead of needing to fiddle with complex platform configurations and go through 200+ page installation guides, the ESB could be stood up with a handful of scripts and created native service bindings in commodity languages such as C#.
Developer Empowerment – ESB’s move the responsibility of creating decoupled interfaces from the developer of the service into a central ESB team. It’s no surprise that nearly every SOA program I’ve ever worked on faced significant resistance from the development teams. And let’s face it, most IT organizations are poorly equipped to handle major culture changes, and that resistance often results in the killing of a SOA program. What if the architecture actually empowered developers to build better and more abstracted interfaces rather than try to wrestle control away from them? The platform would promote a contract-first implementation approach and generate all the boring binding and serialization code so developers can focus on the more fun stuff. By having the service interface code artifacts tied more closely to the service provider code, it opens up opportunities to better manage versions and dependencies through source control and CI.
We’ve had a lot of fun designing and developing this product over the last two and a half years. We are excited to offer the Orbital Bus to the community to collaborate and gather as much feedback as we can. Working with the open source community, we hope to create a more efficient and developer-centric way of integrating across distributed systems. We hope you will join us on this journey!