Following the Roadmap to Microsoft Integration

December 27, 2015 4 Comments

Microsoft has just released a document detailing their roadmap to integration. With all of the recent activity in the cloud around integration – including the release of Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services two years ago, followed by a seemingly different change of direction with Azure App Service announcement earlier this year – there has been much confusion about where Microsoft was headed in the integration space. This has been challenging for partners and customers who want to ensure that they invest in the “right” technology when building out their enterprise integration capability.

I am pleased to say that this document finally delivers some much-needed clarification in this respect. Aside from reinforcing that “BizTalk is not dead” and confirming some key new features in the much-anticipated BizTalk Server 2016 release, it also shows how Microsoft is aiming to close the gap between traditional on-premises integration afforded by the server product and the modern API-based approach offered in Azure:

convergence

Read more of this post

Filed under Azure, BizTalk Tagged with , , , , ,

Latest Pluralsight Course is Now Live!

June 17, 2015 Leave a comment

Pluralsight

Really pleased to announce that my latest Pluralsight course on Azure Hybrid Connections is now live!  This has consumed no insignificant amount of time and effort lately – which goes a long way to explaining the infrequency of my blogging lately.

This is only a short “first look” course, although it took me several weeks to complete it due to work commitments and a virus that stole my voice for awhile. There are two reasons for the short course:

  • Since this is still a “preview” feature in Azure, a short introductory course seemed prudent;
  • Turns out that in 1 hour 48 minutes I was able to cover pretty much everything you need to know about Hybrid Connections anyway!

Read more of this post

Filed under Azure Tagged with , , , , ,

Issue with Hybrid Connections and the PowerShell API

May 10, 2015 Leave a comment

While recently playing around with the PowerShell API Azure Hybrid Connections, I stumbled across an interesting “feature” when managing registrations within the on-premises Connection Manager.

As outlined in the MSDN documentation, there are five cmdlets that are included with the Hybrid Connection Manager that you download and install from the Azure portal:

  • Add-HybridConnection
  • Update-HybridConnection
  • Delete-HybridConnection
  • Get-HybridConnection
  • Set-HybridConnectionManagerConfiguration

The first three require a connection string as a parameter, which you can copy from the Hybrid Connection itself in the Azure Portal by clicking the “Manage Connection” button:

Read more of this post

Filed under Azure Tagged with , ,

Busy Days!

May 9, 2015 Leave a comment

If you’re wondering why my blogging frequency has dropped off over the last couple of months, it’s because I’ve been busy with some other projects. Here are just a few of them:

Brisbane Azure Bootcamp

BAB2015_Dan_OrientationAlthough originally intended to be the Brisbane chapter of the Global Azure Bootcamp, we had to change the date to a week later since the global event coincided with ANZAC Day in Australia. This year marking the 100th anniversary of the event at Gallipoli, it seemed irreverent (and also impractical) to hold the event on that day. So we joined Perth in organising our own version of the all-day event. Alessandro Cardoso from Readify and myself were the main organisers, while Damien Berry set up the event website.

 

BAB2015_Dan_HCWhat a success! With over 50 registrations, we had a full house at Microsoft headquarters, with the event stretching from 8:30am to 5:30pm. Presenters included Readify’s Alessandro Cardoso and Andrew Harcourt, myself on Hybrid Connections, and Microsoft’s Steve van Bodegraven with a session on Azure ML and lean start-ups.

Lots of prizes were given out thanks to sponsors Mexia, Pluralsight, and the Global Azure Bootcamp. Also a big thanks to Readify for funding the catering.

Brisbane Azure User Group

For the next Brisbane Azure User Group event, I’ll be presenting with Mexia’s Lee Simpson on Logic Apps – so preparation for that is keeping me occupied as well.

Pluralsight

And if that was not enough, I’m also authoring my second Pluralsight course. While I’m not allowed to say too much about the content until it’s published, I can reveal that it is based on an exciting Azure technology directly related to hybrid integration. Only one more module to go! Expect an announcement in a few weeks. 🙂

Of course there are other things stealing my time (and sleep) away as well, including heavier than usual workloads at our current client and preparation for a looming deadline for lodging my income tax return. But I hope to be back to more regular blogging next month! There are plenty of exciting things to write about…

Filed under Achievements, Events Tagged with , , , ,

Hello to the New Cloud Integration Platform: Azure App Service

March 25, 2015 Leave a comment

Following Scott Guthrie’s & Bill Staples’ Azure Announcement this morning, I published this post on Mexia’s blog giving my overview of Azure App Service, the new Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering for web and mobile apps that allows you to quickly and easily build powerful new integration solutions at an enterprise scale.

App Service Overview

Rolling the existing Azure Web Sites, Mobile Services, and BizTalk Services into a single platform makes a lot of sense on many levels, not only from the rapid development perspective and the leveraging of existing enterprise capabilities such as auto-scaling, etc. – but also introduces a significant cost savings with the new pricing model!

But rather than ramble on here any more about it, I’ll point you to some excellent write-ups by some of the top integration experts in the world. Here you will find four different perspectives with lots of detailed information:

Or, check out these links directly to Microsoft resources:

You can try it all out for free right now… so why not have a go?

Filed under Azure, BizTalk Tagged with , ,

Integrate 2014 Summit: “Microservices” is the Word

December 17, 2014 3 Comments

Thanks to the generous investment of my employer Mexia, I had the enormous privilege of attending the Global BizTalk Summit in Redmond last week, organised by BizTalk360 and Microsoft and entitled “Integrate 2014”. As with all these events, I treasure thePass opportunity to meet face to face with the top minds and achievers in the Microsoft integration industry, catching up with old acquaintances and making many new ones.

In case you haven’t already heard, there was a jaw-dropping revelation to most of us in the room during the second presentation by Bill Staples. Most of us were anxious to hear about the anticipated new release of Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services (MABS). Version 2.0 was expected to include a greatly enhanced Visual Studio design surface, workflow (orchestration), a business rules engine, a framework for building custom adapters, and much more.

But all of that changed when Bill showed a slide that revealed the new cloud App Platform with “BizTalk Microservices” at the core. So what exactly are “BizTalk Microservices”? Answer: a set of discrete reusable components with a HTTP/REST endpoint that can be assembled as needed into composite services. It is essentially, “build your own integration app” by choosing from a wide selection of microservices from the gallery and/or building your own. The services are hosted in the same app containers used by Azure Websites today, which promises all the mature scalability features afforded by that platform. Read more of this post

Filed under Azure, BizTalk, Events Tagged with , , , , ,

Gotchas When Accessing an IaaS SQL Server in an Azure Cloud Service

August 21, 2014 Leave a comment

It’s not that uncommon a scenario… You implement a spectacular BizTalk Server integration solution with well-designed Business Activity Monitoring, and you want to expose all that BAM goodness out through a custom-designed Web application built with HTML5, etc.

What might make this scenario slightly less common is when you’re hosting the BizTalk Server infrastructure in Azure. In this case, your custom Web application needs to be hosted within the same virtual network in order to access the BAM databases – unless of course you want to expose your SQL Server to the world by establishing a TCP endpoint on a port like 1433 (usually not a great idea).

Establishing that connectivity should be trivial – and it probably is if you get past a few potential stumbling blocks. I thought I might list some of them here in hopes that it may be helpful to others who try this.

Read more of this post

Filed under Azure, BizTalk Tagged with , , , ,

User Group Presentation on Hybrid Connections

August 18, 2014 1 Comment

Last week I had the privilege to present on Hybrid Connections at the Brisbane Azure User Group meeting. It was well attended and the community responded very enthusiastically to the ease at which this technology enables you to connect Azure Web Sites and Mobile Services to on-premises resources behind your corporate firewall. One attendee was so excited by the feature that he stayed back after the meeting with his laptop and proceeded to deploy his web site application to Azure right there on the spot, hooking it up in minutes to his on-premises database!

highres_399395482 I’d like to express my gratitude to Santosh Chandwani, a Microsoft Azure Sr. Program Manager who shared his slide deck with me and gave some very helpful tips in preparing my demo. The slides are available on SlideShare if you wish to view the presentation as I presented it, or you can download the original version that Santosh presented at Tech Ed USA.

Santosh also promptly answered some questions raised by the community which I posted on the Azure Advisors Yammer group:

Q: Seems expensive to get more than 5 HC connections?
A: “If there are specific Dev-Test scenarios where the 5 Free HC don’t suffice, please let us know.”

Q: What are the performance/load specifications? Any guidance on where potential bottlenecks may be, and/or best practice guidelines?
A: “In general, the throughput you can achieve with HC is constrained by the internet connectivity between the on-prem network and Azure. Since this is part of the user’s network infrastructure, it is hard for us to provide a specific throughput baseline.
We recommend users assess the throughput that each instance of the on-prem Hybrid Connection Manager provides on their network. Adding more instances may provide higher throughput (again depending on the network infrastructure). Also, for production scenarios, at least 2 instances are recommended for resiliency. ”

Stay tuned for an upcoming webcast about this on the BrizTalk YouTube Channel!

UPDATE: Webcast published!! View it here.

Filed under Azure, BizTalk, Events Tagged with , , , , ,

BizTalk Services – EDI Agreement Deployment Errors

May 21, 2014 1 Comment

This week I’ve been frustrated by “unknown exception” errors whilst trying to deploy an X12 EDI agreement to Windows Azure BizTalk Services. The generic message was of course extremely helpful in isolating the problem:

WABS_AgreementDeploymentError

(“Error: An error occurred while deploying the agreement. Details: Service encountered an unknown exception..”)

It happened that a recent tweet by Microsoft MVP Sam Vanhoutte proved that I wasn’t alone in my angst, as did this entry on the MSDN Azure forum. Unlike SGSJWS however, switching browsers didn’t solve my issue. Sam’s helpful advice to check all configuration items, however, did eventually lead me to closer inspection where I discovered the cause.

Read more of this post

Filed under Azure, BizTalk Tagged with , , , ,

WEBCAST: Integrating BizTalk 2013 with Service Bus Queues & Topics

September 30, 2013 Leave a comment

I’ve just uploaded my latest production on the Brisbane BizTalk YouTube Channel, bringing our library up to four webcasts now! This presentation shows how easy it is to integrate BizTalk Server 2013 with Windows Azure Service Bus queues & topics, facilitating the creation of powerful hybrid applications:

Integrating BizTalk with Windows Azure Service Bus Queues & Topics[ http://youtu.be/jQefUBvc4Dk ]

You can also download the slide deck (complete with notes) from SlideShare [ http://www.slideshare.net/dtoomey/integrating-biztalk-2013-with-windows-azure-server-bus-queues-topics ]

Really loving my new RØDE Podcaster USB microphone, and also Camtasia 8.1 which makes editing these videos so easy!

Filed under Azure, BizTalk Tagged with , , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →

John Glisson - Geek of the Cloth

Thoughts on integration, technology and what-not...

Prashant BizTalk And Azure Integration Blogs

My Integration Experiences - BizTalk And Azure Integration

The CRUCIBLE

THINK: It's not illegal....yet.....

Abdul Rafay's BizTalk Blog

My experiences with BizTalk related to architecture, development and performance in my enterprise.

BizTalk musings

Issues, patterns and useful tips for BizTalk development

EAI Guy.net

Enterprise Applicaiton Integration and SOA 2.0

Connected Pawns

Mainly BizTalk & Little Chess

Adventures inside the Message Box

BizTalk, Azure, and other tools in the Microsoft stack - Johann Cooper

Biz(Talk)2

Talk, talk and more talk about BizTalk

Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings

Blog Featuring Code, Thoughts, and Experiences with Software and Services

Sandro Pereira BizTalk Blog

My notes about BizTalk Server 2004, 2006, 2006 R2, 2009, 2010, 2013 and now also Windows Azure BizTalk Services.

Brisbane Azure User Group

BizTalk Events

Calendar of BizTalk events all over the world!

Mind Over Messaging

Musings on BizTalk, Azure, and Enterprise Integration

WordPress.com News

The latest news on WordPress.com and the WordPress community.