Why product integration infrastructure is harder than you think

Building and maintaining integrations involves more than just making API calls; it presents significant infrastructure challenges that can impact scalability and user experience if not properly addressed. Key issues include the orchestration of tasks, resilience of long-running syncs, handling of high-frequency or real-time data syncing, and managing two-way or incremental syncing to ensure data integrity. Additionally, overcoming API rate limits, ensuring data quality across diverse and evolving schemas, and managing scalability with efficient resource and concurrency control are crucial. Observability is essential, requiring comprehensive monitoring of failures, performance, and rate limits, along with detailed network traffic logs to facilitate debugging and prevent costly outages. Addressing these challenges early on can mitigate potential scaling issues and engineering inefficiencies, ensuring robust and reliable integration solutions.