Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

In the previous blog post I demonstrated how I can secure my internal BizTalk services application with requirements for Federated Security based on SAML tokens. The goal was to enable my BizTalk service to be a “claims-aware” application. Just like with all other cases of virtualizing BizTalk services through Sentinet, turning the BizTalk service application into a “claim-aware” application did not require any coding or configuration changes, the existing BizTalk application remained deployed and configured as is. In this post I would like to continue where I left off in the previous post, and demonstrate how to set up yet another endpoint in the virtual service. This will be the endpoint that leverages the Microsoft Azure Service Bus so that my internal BizTalk services application can be accessible from outside of the internal network through the Azure Service Bus Relay Service. The Microsoft Azure Service Bus Relay service enables you to build hybrid applications that run i...

Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) provides capabilities for EAI and B2B in the cloud. This relative new service was made available for customers in November 2013. WABS is a cloud integration platform or integration platform as a service or IPaaS . Characteristic of IPAAS is that you build your integration on premise, deploy in the cloud, where it is hosted in a service (set of dedicated hardware). The service is offered through a subscription model for operating the service in the cloud (for BizTalk Services this means Windows Azure hence the name Windows Azure BizTalk Services). Currently there are quite some players offering that service like Dell, Attunity, MuleSoft, TIBCO, and so on. Microsoft is currently pushing the service hard to catch up with some of these players and try to quicken/hasten the maturity of the product. Therefore, Microsoft has committed to have a release cadence for new features every three months. The recent release was in February 2014, which added new ...

This year another BizTalk Summit will take place. A recollection of last year’s event is described in a blog post by Michael Stephenson. The 2-day conference last year the was held in December on the Microsoft Campus . It was followed up by BizTalk conference in January in Amsterdam, London and Stockholm.  Both the US and European BizTalk events were successful. Each with over a 100 or 200 participants. Microsoft Products was present at each of the events, speaking and engaging the community . The BizTalk Summit this year will follow directly after the MVP Summit and the Registration of this event is now open! The event is focused on Microsoft Integration technologies, which includes BizTalk Server, the Windows Azure BizTalk Services, and the Windows Azure Service Bus. During the summit you can expect presentations, discussions, and labs to help you understand Microsoft's Integration strategy and roadmap. Since there will quite a few Microsoft Integration MVP (I expected...

Last week I attended the Hybrid Organisation Event in London. A story on the event can be found on BizTalk360 blog. I enjoyed it and was good to see some friends and my old colleagues Sander Nefs and Rene Brauwers , After event Sander wrote to two interesting posts on Windows Azure Services Bus after seeing Sam VanHoutte session: UK Connected Systems User Group – BizTalk Services questions BizTalk Services Questions and answers In my previous post I pointed out to where slides of Sam his session on WABS can be found. In case you like to learn more about Richard’s talks on integration you see view his courses on Pluralsight (look for Patterns of Cloud Integration ). Clemens had an interesting session during that day that lasted two hours: next wave of integration (device to cloud). You can see more on this topic through Channel 9 Clemens Vasters Subscribe (look for Device to Cloud Series ). It was well organized and successful event. Organized by Microsoft UK and ...

Recently I wrote a post for TechNet Wiki Blog and pointed out that many resources can be found through the TechNet Wiki . So in case you want to check out what is available on TechNet Wiki around integration I suggest reading Integration is my business and business is good! . I have been working on a couple of articles for TechNet Wiki last 18 months and published them. I am not the only one. There's a lot of us in the BizTalk community for instance that have published and edited numerous articles. The number of BizTalk related articles on TechNet Wiki is close to 200 by now ranging from BizTalk versions 2006 R2 to 2013, general ones (common across versions) and Windows Azure BizTalk Services. You can access them from one place: BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki . In case you have not yet bookmarked it then you the opportunity now. If you like to participate in writing and/or editing articles feel free to do so. You will need to sign in or up and you all set to g...

In my previous post I discussed sending messages to a Service Bus queue. These messages send to the queue are then picked up by the SB-Messaging Adapter for BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP, which is running in a VM on Windows Azure. BizTalk will then process these messages by inserting them into a table.  I used one client to send multiple messages to the queue. I measured the time it took to send messages to the queue not the time it took for BizTalk to insert each message in SQL Server 2008 R2 table. However, the latency between the queue and SQL Server 2008 R2 was relatively low. As soon as all the messages were sent the same amount of records were present in the table. Overall the performance is not bad when it comes to a few thousand messages. Latency and throughput are good. In this post I take a different approach. I will simulate a run with 10000 participants. The run is 15K and there are passing time marks at 5 and 10K. At 15K the finishing time will be registered. I will us...