Systems integration is where otherwise well-designed software quietly breaks down. APIs drift, vendors change behavior without notice, credentials expire, and assumptions made during development surface months later under real traffic. Most integration failures are not dramatic – they are subtle, compounding errors that degrade reliability until something critical stops working. Treating integrations as “glue code” is one of the most common causes of production instability.
M Media approaches integrations as long-lived systems with explicit contracts, failure modes, and operational ownership. We design integrations to expect partial failure, degraded dependencies, and malformed input as normal conditions, not edge cases. Authentication lifecycles, retries, timeouts, idempotency, and observability are not optional features – they are core design requirements. An integration should behave predictably even when upstream systems do not.
The result is integration infrastructure that is diagnosable, recoverable, and safe to evolve. When something goes wrong, operators can determine what happened, where it failed, and whether the issue is transient or systemic. When vendors change behavior, the blast radius is limited. Integrations stop being a source of anxiety and instead become dependable components of the larger system.
What We Integrate
We specialize in integrating systems that were never designed to work together — often across vendors, time zones, and reliability guarantees.
- Third-party APIs (shipping, payments, identity, CRM, inventory)
- Internal services and legacy platforms
- Webhook-driven and event-based systems
- Scheduled data syncs and batch pipelines
API Design & Consumption
We treat APIs as contracts, not conveniences. Whether we’re building an API or consuming one, the goal is predictable behavior under real-world conditions.
- Clear service boundaries and responsibility ownership
- Versioned endpoints and backward compatibility strategies
- Strict input validation and schema enforcement
- Idempotent request handling for retries and replays
Authentication & Authorization
Authentication failures are one of the most common causes of silent production outages. We design auth flows that renew, rotate, and fail safely.
- OAuth 2.0 flows (client credentials, authorization code, refresh)
- Token caching, renewal, and expiration handling
- Signed payload validation and request verification
- Least-privilege access models
Webhooks & Event-Driven Systems
Webhooks are deceptively simple — until traffic spikes, retries pile up, or vendors send malformed payloads. We design webhook handlers to be defensive by default.
- Signature verification and payload validation
- Queue-backed processing to avoid blocking vendors
- Replay protection and deduplication
- Graceful handling of malformed or unexpected events
Failure Handling & Recovery
Integrations fail. The difference between a minor incident and a major outage is how failure is handled.
- Retry strategies with backoff and jitter
- Circuit breakers to prevent cascading failures
- Timeout enforcement and fail-fast behavior
- Clear error classification (transient vs permanent)
Data Pipelines & Synchronization
Data synchronization issues often surface weeks or months after deployment. We design pipelines that are auditable, restartable, and observable.
- CSV and JSON ingestion with strict validation
- Scheduled jobs with checkpointing and resumability
- Conflict detection and reconciliation strategies
- Clear data ownership and lifecycle definitions
Observability & Diagnostics
If you can’t see what an integration is doing, you can’t trust it. We build observability into the system from day one.
- Structured logging for requests, responses, and failures
- Correlation IDs for tracing across systems
- Metrics for latency, error rates, and retries
- Actionable logs instead of noisy output
Security & Defensive Defaults
Integrations often become attack surfaces by accident. We design with defensive defaults to reduce risk and blast radius.
- Strict input sanitization and payload limits
- Rate limiting and abuse prevention
- Secrets management and secure configuration handling
- Explicit allow-lists for outbound connections
Typical Integration Projects
- Replacing fragile point-to-point API calls with queue-backed workflows
- Migrating legacy API credentials to OAuth-based authentication
- Stabilizing webhook systems under high-volume event loads
- Building internal service layers to isolate vendor instability
How We Approach Integration Work
- Discovery first – Identify failure modes before writing code
- Scoped delivery – Defined systems, defined outcomes
- Production realism – Built for real traffic, not demos
- Documentation – Clear handoff and operational visibility
Have a system that’s already misbehaving?
If integrations are brittle, opaque, or quietly failing, we can help stabilize them. Start a technical conversation.
