In chapters 2-5 we created systems from scratch and applied AI services from the start. Of course, the real world is not always this clean and simple. Almost all of us have to deal with legacy systems and technical debt. In this chapter we are going to examine some strategies for applying AI services to existing systems. We will start by looking at some architectural patterns for this, and from there we will develop some specific examples drawn from real world experience.
There is no escaping the fact that real world enterprise computing is “messy.” For a medium to large enterprise, the technology estate is typically large, sprawling, and has often grown organically over time.
An organization’s compute infrastructure can be broken down along domain lines such as finance, HR, marketing, line-of-business systems, and so on. Each of these domains may be composed of many systems from various vendors, along with home-grown software, and will usually mix legacy with more modern Software as a Service (SaaS) delivered applications.