Every six months or so I read a post on sites like Hackernews that the enterprise service bus concept is dead and that it was a horrible concept to begin with. Yet I personally have great experiences with them, even in large, messy enterprise landscapes.

Frederick's delirious rantings

Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) remain valuable in large organizations despite recurring criticism. ESBs provide decoupling at application edges, centralized integration control with queuing and throttling, and operational visibility across connections. However, they introduce risks like hidden business logic in translation layers, vendor lock-in, skill bottlenecks, and additional costs. ESBs work best in large portfolios with frequent changes and mixed SaaS/legacy/custom applications, but require strict governance to avoid common pitfalls. The author recommends modeling ESBs as connection parameters rather than separate applications in architecture diagrams.

The enterprise service bus