What is Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)?

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a software architecture pattern used for designing and implementing communication and integration between disparate applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). It acts as a central intermediary, enabling applications to communicate with each other by translating messages between different protocols and data formats, routing messages, and managing security. ESBs are commonly used to integrate legacy systems, cloud services, and other enterprise applications, thereby simplifying the integration process and reducing point-to-point connections.