What ESB to use? [closed]

Question

We're considering an ESB infrastructure.

When would you consider open source products like Mule and when would you consider packages like TIBCO, BizTalk or Oracle Fusion?

Answer 1

Cost and support are the obvious two distinguishing features.

If you have no money to pay for licenses, then open source is a good alternative.

If you don't like open source because of managerial objections, then you'll go with a licensed product.

With open source, you want to be sure that you're getting something that has some longevity to it. The signs are vibrant developer and user communities, easy access to forum support, periodic updates to the software, standards-based with alternatives available, etc. You don't want to make a choice for something as fundamental as infrastructure and regret it a year later because the open source project has fallen apart.

ESBs can play a lot of roles:

1. gateway for B2B with external parties
2. messaging between services
3. transformation between formats (EDI, XML, etc.)
4. orchestration of services
5. centralization of cross-cutting concerns like auditing, logging, metrics, etc.

You'll want to make a careful decision to meet all these needs.

Answer 2

I know nothing of their product, but Loose coupling versus decoupling ... briefly discusses an important point often missed, and one that can bite you very hard later on.

I worry that BizTalk is being taken over by the .Net types within Microsoft, and may be headed in the direction of the closely-bound interfaces of WCF. Read a lot, ask a lot of questions. Don't expect much of open source offerings.

Answer 3

Here is a detailed report that might be helpful to you: Forrester Wave: Enterprise Service Bus, Q2 2011

Note that the report does not cover several popular open source ESB solutions.

Please refer to @duffymo's response for guidance on whether to use an open source ESB.

Answer 4

Among other concerns, given the nature of the ESB design pattern, performance is very important. There are many results published out there. Here is the latest round of ESB performance done in January 2013. However in the performance space, it is advisable to run your own performance test and pick your choice, rather than banking on what are published out there.

In addition to performance, ease of use, extensibility, development effort it takes to integrate systems via the ESB needs to be taken into account. Sometimes, you may start the integration with an ESB, and later, as the system evolves, ability to govern the solution, security, ability to monitor, metering and billing, number of connectors supported, will come into picture. So you might want to watch out for the related solutions around the ESB along those lines.

In general, as it is the case with any software, total cost of ownership (TCO) is also key. Sometimes, it would seemingly be less costly to start with one vendor, yet over time costs might proliferate. Specially, supportability and maintainability is important, given the central nature of the ESB use.