Summary
Your integrations grew. Nobody designed them.
Every team solved their own problem. Point-to-point connections multiplied. Business logic leaked across boundaries. Now every business change triggers a technical scramble. Nobody can fully explain why the system behaves the way it does.
The root cause is not the technology. It is that integrations were never treated as a business capability. They were treated as plumbing.
Integration is not about moving data between systems. Well, not only about that! It is about connecting meaning: the business events, decisions, and domain logic that belong together - or deliberately do not. When that meaning is missing, the architecture has a high risk of becoming implicit - one that emerges unintentionally through repeated building rather than purposeful design. It is an architecture that nobody chose, nobody owns, and nobody can safely change.
This course teaches you how to change that.
For who?
Teams reinvent the wheel on every integration project because they lack a shared method. Every ad-hoc decision accumulates as technical debt that halts business change. This course gives your team the tools to make consistent, defensible, reusable integration decisions aligned to your business.
- Integration Architects who want to move beyond the plumbing
- Staff and Principal Engineers designing integrations that serve business goals
- Business Analysts who need to understand where the real seams in their processes are
What You’ll Learn
After four sessions, you can do things you could not do before:
- Run a design session grounded in business intent. Use collaborative modelling to surface where systems must interoperate, what meaning flows between them, and where the real boundaries are before a single line of integration code is written.
- Make the implicit explicit. Identify the hidden architectural decisions in your system landscape, name them, and build a rationale for changing them or keeping them.
- Choose architectures with a framework, not a gut feeling. Apply a structured trade-off analysis to evaluate event-driven, broker, and API-led architectural styles against your actual business context. Defend your choice to architects, engineers, and stakeholders.
- Leave with a reusable methodology. Not a theory to file away. A playbook you apply to the next integration project and the one after that.
Four live online sessions, 3.5 hours each. Maximum eight participants. Every session combines just enough theory with immediate practice: guided design exercises, trade-off discussions, and group reviews on realistic scenarios. You do not watch. You model and design. Each topic follows the same rhythm: problem framing, tools and patterns, hands-on design, group debrief. By the end of each session, you have applied what you learned.
Learning objectives
Leverage collaborative modelling to surface integration requirements. Use EventStorming to map business processes, events, and bounded contexts - uncovering where systems must interoperate and why. (New to EventStorming? We cover it from the ground up.)
Visualise meaning flows. Use Domain Message Flow to trace how events, commands, and queries travel across system boundaries - and match them to integration patterns with known trade-offs.
Navigate implicit architecture. Recognise the signals that an ecosystem has grown without intent: tactical-only decisions, missing rationale, hype-driven choices. Build the case for making it explicitly defined.
Apply trade-off analysis. Use a structured tool to weigh integration options considering coupling, complexity, cost, performance, and evolvability - and choose with confidence.
Understand maturity stages. Enterprise Application Integration is not a binary choice. Learn to read your current landscape and plan a strategy that fits where you are, not where a whitepaper assumes you should be.
Design for business alignment. Build integration solutions that remain valid as your organisation and domain evolve - not ones that lock in today's structure forever.
Schedule
- Course intro and goals. Why interoperability fails: the business case. Introduction of base concepts: Application Integration at System vs Ecosystem Architecture level, Domain-Driven Design context and strategic tools. Implicit architecture: from efficient point-to-point to spaghetti. Signals, biases, and consequences.
- Event-Driven Architecture: deep dive into the key differences between intra-system communication and ecosystem scale events, key integration patterns, design exercise, trade-off analysis in practice.
- Broker Architecture: deep dive into mediated interoperability, introduction of the concept of an Integration Platform, key behavioral patterns, design exercise, trade-off analysis in practice.
- API-Led Architecture: deep dive into high complexity ecosystems, key integration patterns, design exercise. Synthesis: choosing the right approach for your context. Integration strategy and next steps.
Prerequisites
You should know the basics of EventStorming.
What participants say
“Building integrations is one of the most challenging parts of enterprise development. This workshop does a great job at discussing both the challenges and suggests actionable techniques to discover robust solutions and reduce the implementation risk.”
- David Vydra, Development Expert, SAP, 2025
“This workshop delivered a practical, DDD-led approach to Enterprise Application Integration. Participants compared integration options with clear strengths and weaknesses and practiced trade-off and quality-attribute analysis in a hands-on format. The environment was inclusive and engaging, with approachable instructors. Best suited to intermediate and advanced practitioners; complete beginners may find some scenarios challenging.”
- Ken Bonny, Owner, More than Code BV, 2025
About the instructors
Karol Skrzymowski - Managing Integration Architect at Capgemini, Co-Founder at BridgingTheGap.eu.com. Over fifteen years of dedicated experience in Enterprise Integration Architecture, with deep expertise in API-Led and Event-Driven Architecture. Has worked with Tibco BusinessWorks, Boomi, webMethods, MuleSoft, Azure Integration Services, and WSO2. Actively contributes to the integration community through whitepapers,training materials and live streams about architecture related topics
Philipp Kostyra - Development Architect at SAP, DDD Coach and Educator. Has worked for over a decade at SAP leading domain-driven design adoption. Co-leads the DDD Community at SAP since 2019. Trainer in the SAP Architecture Curriculum, coaching practitioners to apply DDD to real business problems.