The need for an Enterprise Wide API and Payload Definition

Enterprises tend to move from deploying a limited number of large monolith like applications to designing the enterprise application landscape into a more domain driven design model. In the domain driven design concept each domain, or bounded context, can hold a business function or business capability. Where it used to be that multiple business capabilities and supporting functions would be consolidated into a single technical solution you now see that they are more dispersed and more atomic.

In this model each business function or business capability might be located in its own bounded context and might leverage its own technology and its own application or technology vendor. Some implementations might be custom build, some might be consumed as a SaaS service and some might (still) be packaged based solutions which are deployed leveraging IaaS, or in some cases still running on-premise in a customer datacenter.

Integration patterns as enterprise glue
With the growing number of different applications and services in the wider enterprise landscape and the desire to ensure they all interact as one the importance of integration is growing rapidly.

In general, two main principles play a growing and more important role to ensure applications glue together to provide a single experience and service to the business and the customer. Event driven architecture is one in combination with an “everything has an API” strategy. The combination of…