Capability 06 / 18
Integration Excellence
Connecting systems, teams, and processes without friction.
Every non-trivial platform ends up being a network of integrations — internal services, third-party APIs, legacy systems that aren't going anywhere. The difference between a healthy integration layer and a fragile one is whether it was designed as a layer at all, or grew as a series of one-off point-to-point connections.
Event-driven and message-based patterns tend to win here: they decouple systems in time as well as space, so one slow dependency doesn't cascade into an outage three services away.
What this looks like in practice
- •Event-driven architecture used to decouple systems, not just move data faster
- •Third-party and legacy integrations wrapped behind stable internal contracts
- •25+ integration patterns across enterprise environments — seen the failure modes, not just the happy path
- •Retry, backoff, and idempotency treated as integration requirements, not edge cases