Breaking up an ESB into more modular fine-grained integration components might seem like  it adds more complexity to your infrastructure. You can now see that much of the creation and  management of these discrete topologies for each integration is done for us by K8s, so it no  longer seems so daunting. Furthermore, adopting container orchestration reduces the  deployment and administration skills operational teams need because they largely are  consistent across any solution that sits on a container-based platform. This  operational  consistency  becomes all more important in the decentralized ownership of integration. 3.2.7 Lightweight run times: How the modern integration run time has  changed K8s can perform deployments, create resilient topologies, self-heal, and scale elastically, but  your runtimes must be lightweight, that is, they ideally must be a single process that pulls  everything it needs from the file system on start and requires no further online configuration. For this reason, integration run times have evolved in recent years. Let’s have look at some of  the key improvements that enable the characteristics we discussed: GLYPH<SM590000> Rapid start-up: The run times are a single process that runs in containers such as Docker.  They are lightweight enough that they can be started and stopped in seconds, and can be  easily administered by orchestration frameworks such as K8s. GLYPH<SM590000> Dependency free :  The run times no longer have hard dependencies on databases or  message queues that must be installed alongside them, although they are still adept at  connecting to them remotely. GLYPH<SM590000> File system installation, configuration, and deployment: The run times can be installed and  configured by laying their binary and configuration files on a file system and starting them.  Furthermore, there is no longer a need to deploy integrations to a live running integration  server. The integrations artifacts (maps, flows, configuration, and others) can be laid down  on the file system. This situation is ideal for the layered file systems of Docker images and  the automated pipelines that are essential for CI/CD. For more information, see 5.5, “Application integration: IBM App Connect” on page 155.  Now, we continue with a few more cloud-native characteristics and see how they are handled  by modern integration run times. 3.2.8 Log-based monitoring 3.2.9 API intra-application communication Cloud-native components should communicate by using runtime-neutral protocols, the most  common of which is RESTful APIs. Exposing and calling APIs is part of an integration’s basic  function.  You should not be connecting dire ctly to individual containers , so monitoring cannot be done  by direct connection. Instead, the integration run times are enabled to report their status by  using standardized logging, which can then be aggregated by a monitoring stack on the  container.  62  Accelerating Modernization with Agile Integration