JD Edwards and microservice based integrations

The cloud is changing our approaches to everything, and so it should.  It gives us so many modern and flexible constructs which can enable faster innovation and agility and deliver value to the business faster.

You can see from my slide below that we should be advocating strategic integrations in our organisations, seen below as a microservice layer.  This single layer gives a consistent interface “write the code once” approach to exposing JD Edwards to BOB (Best of Breed) systems.  This also will allow generic consumption and expose of web services – where you do not have to write a lot of JD Edwards code, or get into too much technical debt.

If you look at the below, we are exposing an open method of communicating with our “monolithic” and potentially “on prem” services.  This microservice layer can actually be in the cloud (and I would recommend this).  You could choose to use a middleware to expose this layer, or generic pub/sub techniques that are provided to you by all of the standard public cloud providers.

Looking at a little more detail in the below diagram for JDE shows you the modern JDE techniques for achieving this.  You’d wrap AIS calls to be STANDARD interactions to standard forms.  Just like BSSV was created to “AddSalesOrder”, the same could be done in a microservice.  This would be responsible for calling the standard and specific screens in JDE via AIS.  You are therefore abstracting yourself from the AIS layer.  If you needed to augment that canonical from information from another system, you are not getting too invested in JDE – it’s all in your microservice layer.

This also gives you the added benefit of being able to rip and replace any of the pieces of the design, as you’ve created a layer of abstraction for all of your systems – Nice.  Bring on best of breed.

The other cool thing about an approach like this is that you can start to amalgamate your “SaaS silos” which is the modern equivalent of “disconnected data silos”.  If your business is subscribing to SaaS services, you have a standardised approach of being able to get organisational wide benefit from the subscription.

Outbound from JDE, you can see that we are using RTE’s.  These might go directly to a AWS SQS queue, or they might also go to google subscriber queue or Microsoft Azure cloud services.  All could queue these messages.  The beauty of this is that the integration points already exist in JDE as RTE’s.  You just need to point these queues (or TXN server) to your middleware or cloud pub/sub service for reliable and fault tolerant delivery.  You can then have as many microservice subscribe to these messages and perform specific and independent tasks based upon the information coming in.

Wow, JDE has done a great job of letting you innovate at the speed of cloud by giving you some really cool integration methods.  There is nothing stopping you plugging in IoT, mobility, integrations, websites, forms and more into JD Edwards simply and easily.  Also giving you a extremely robust and secure ERP doing ensuring master data management and a single source of truth.

This model works on prem, hybrid or complete cloud.