Enterprise API Integration Architecture

Every integration boundary runs Zod validation schemas that catch structural changes at runtime before anything broken propagates downstream. Plus, we generate TypeScript types directly from upstream API specs -- so schema drift surfaces as a build-time error, not a production incident you find out about from a customer. The gateway's transformation functions do the heavy lifting of isolating upstream changes from what your frontend actually consumes. Your React components never see a raw SAP response. Ever.

GraphQL makes sense for relational, read-heavy queries -- product catalogs, customer profiles, content aggregation -- where frontend teams need flexible data fetching without over-fetching entire resources. REST handles transactional writes that need idempotency: payment captures, order submissions, webhook receivers. Most enterprise projects we build honestly use both. But they're unified behind a single typed gateway, so your frontend team doesn't have to care which protocol a given operation uses under the hood.

Circuit breakers and graceful degradation get configured per integration, not as a blanket fallback. Cached data keeps serving reads with staleness indicators so customers aren't staring at broken pages. Event queues buffer writes with automatic retry and dead letter handling so nothing gets lost during an outage. And observability dashboards surface exactly what's down and what's affected -- no more "something's wrong, check everything." We nail down the degradation strategies during architecture design, not during an incident at 2am.

Here's the thing most teams skip: clear system-of-record ownership for every data entity. Pricing lives in the ERP. Product descriptions live in the PIM. Customer records live in the CRM. The gateway enforces those ownership rules programmatically. Event-driven sync keeps downstream mirrors fresh within seconds. And conflict resolution logic gets defined during the architecture phase -- not left to whoever's on call when two systems disagree about a price.

The gateway exposes standard GraphQL and REST endpoints, so any frontend can consume it -- Next.js, React, Vue, even a legacy server-rendered app that's been running since 2014. We typically wire the gateway to your existing frontend first while building new Next.js pages in parallel. Migration is incremental. You don't need a full rebuild to start getting clean, typed API access to your backend systems. That's kind of the whole point.

Every request gets a correlation ID that traces through the gateway into each upstream system call. We log response times, payload sizes, and error rates per integration -- not just aggregate metrics, but per-system breakdowns. Custom dashboards show real data freshness: how stale is your product pricing right now, how long since the last Salesforce sync. Alerts trigger on sync lag thresholds, error rate spikes, and upstream latency degradation. Each alert has a runbook attached. So your team knows what to do, not just that something's wrong.

Eleven to eighteen weeks from audit to production handoff -- the range depends on how many systems we're connecting and how gnarly the transformation logic gets. But your frontend team isn't waiting until week eighteen to see anything. The first typed APIs are available within six weeks. We phase delivery deliberately so your developers start building against real data early. No big-bang launch. No six-month blackout where nothing ships.