With the adoption of Cloud and Cloud-native architectures, application integration has changed. Support for multiple devices, channels, and making the architecture responsive is one of its key tenets. APIs are the key to this. Being application-agnostic and based on web standards, APIs are invokable across channels and serve to decouple the components. An API Management layer helps in security and performance through configurable policies.
There is no longer a central middleware component that does the integration, rather the architecture is distributed and loosely coupled, helping realize the goal of it being elastic. Containerized microservices and integration components are invokable separately resulting in them being more resilient than if they were a single monolith.