Digital Integration Hub With Apache Ignite

A digital integration hub (DIH) is an advanced platform architecture that aggregates multiple back-end systems and databases into a low-latency and shared data store. Apache Ignite® functions as such a store that caches and persists data sets scattered across many disjointed back-end databases and makes them available through high-performance APIs to your applications.

Applications access Ignite via an API service layer and experience substantial performance improvements by requesting data from only the Ignite distributed store.

As a digital integration hub component, Apache Ignite:

• Enables large-scale and high-throughput architectures that prevent back-end systems from getting overwhelmed with excessive workloads
• Avoids complex integrations between back-end databases and front-end API services

Synchronization of Apache Ignite and Back-End Systems

Ignite, as the high-performance data store, needs to be synchronized with the back-end databases via streaming, event-based, change data capture (CDC), or other techniques.

Ignite provides the CacheStore interface for uni-directional synchronization between an Ignite cluster and an external store supporting relational databases and some NoSQL stores. The interface allows Ignite to write-through or write-behind all the changes to the backend-systems automatically. It also includes transactions - Ignite coordinates and commits a transaction across its in-memory cluster as well as an external transactional database.

For bi-directional synchronization, you can consider various streaming, CDC, and event-based technologies. For instance, Kafka, Spark, and Debezium are widely used to keep Ignite in sync with other databases.

Real-Time Analytics

Although real-time analytics is not a defining characteristic of digital integration hub architectures, in some situations, you can end up consolidating operational and analytical data silos in Apache Ignite. If this happens, you can tap into Ignite SQL, compute, and machine learning capabilities for real-time analytics needs.