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BizTalk Summit 2015 - London

Sven Van den brande

• 6 min read

This week i attended the BizTalk Summit in London. The people of BizTalk360 did a great job to put everything together.
330 attendees from 20 different countries, 161 different companies all in one room.

I will try to give you an overview of all the sessions. I will not go to much in detail but you will get all the necessary information.

Day 1

Code based orchestrations in the cloud (Dan Rosanova)

Dan started the first session of the day (schedule changed). For just a monday morning it was a surprise for al the attendees
to have such a technical session. His session was about the durable task framework.

Dan explained the main stuff:

  • Durability
  • Scalability
  • Reliability
    

Integrating cloud with existing IBM Systems (Paul Larsen)

Microsoft released recently the Azure App Services platform and introduced a couple Connectors to connect on premise infrastructure to the cloud.
In this session Paul gave us an overview of the new API Apps that enable the possibility to connect on premise IMB systems with the cloud.

Roadmap Azure Connectors:

  • TI Connector (cics, ims)
  • TI Service (host-initiated)
  • DRDA Service (host-initiated)

Roadmap on premise servers:

  • HIS V10 Rapid Deployment TAP (informix)
  • Host Integration Server HIS V10

Keynote (Karandeep Anand)

Karandeep Anand presented about Microsoft view on Azure Websites, BizTalk Services and Mobile Services also the roadmap was an item he talked about.

As these products are quite young. They need many improvements. So they need feedback from the developers.

One of the main pillars to have a mild learning curve and availability for everyone.
Karandeep elaborated on the strong focus on customer and developer feedback.

Some important news was announced:

  • On premise Azure App Services (no date yet)
  • Major version for BizTalk Server will be released in 2016

Inside Logic Apps (Stephen Siciliano)

For me this was a very interesting session, Stephen gave us an insight look on how you can use Azure Logic Apps to automate processes without any code.

The only thing you need is Azure. So you have all the functionality from Azure like auditing, authentication, API management,…
Also on premise support is planned with the Azure Pack.

The inspiration for the New Logic App Servcies was the Azure Resource Manager. The Azure Resource Manager is focusing on the Azure Platform. Where the Logic App Services are focusing on different types of resources.

Stephen had also a demo for us. He used a Http listener that triggers a flow using Twilio, Yammer & dropbox.

BizTalk API Apps (Prashant Kumar)

Before moving to the new Azure App Services for BizTalk, Prashant started with some recap of the existing Azure BizTalk Services.
We don’t have features like long running workflows,…

After that he showed us a demo using an EDIFACT scenario

–> AS Connector –> BizTalk EDIFACT –> BizTalk Transform Services –> Http

At the end he finished with a view on the BizTalk Rules in the Azure Portal

Connectors (Sameer Chabungbam)

In this hands-on session Sameer showed us how to build a connector for the Azure App Services platform and how to get it working for Logic Apps. Once you’ve ready with building a custom connector it can be used from everywhere by any type of App.

Sameer gave us a demo by building an Azure Storage Queue connector that can be used inside the Logic App.


BizTalk360 Product Update & Surprise Announcments (Saravana Kumar & Nino Crudele)

The session started with a demo from Nino Crudele. Last year he announced the “NoS” addin. Now their was a new announcement.
The NoS addin will be a commercial product under the BizTalk360 family and will be available soon.

You can find more information on http://www.biztalk360.com/nos/

After that Saravana explained also the new features of the latest release from BizTalk 360.

An Integration Platform to support Vision 2025 (Michael Stephenson & Oliver Davy)

Higher education has changed in the past decades. The University of Northumbria is looking into the integration space and how they can use it during the next years.

Their current application grew out to an huge application. Therefore the university is researching this to come up with a new view and architecture with the help of Michael.

Michael showed us the Integration Tools an technologies from the past, present and the future.

At the end Michael gave a demo where he integrated the game “Minecraft”.

Top 14 Integration Challenges I’ve seen in the Past 14 Years (Stephen W. Thomas)

In this session Stephen gave us a quick overview of the most common challenges and mistakes made within integration projects.

Due to other sessions that took longer then expected he needed to rush. I hope to see some longer version on another time..



Day 2

Hybrid Solutions with the current BizTalk Server 2013 R2 (Steef-Jan Wiggers)

Steef-Jan kicked of the second day.
In this session Steef-Jan talked about the challenges with BizTalk Server 2013 R2.

He also showed us how easy it is in BizTalk to consume REST services and work with JSON files.

10x latency improvement – how to squeeze performance out of your BizTalk solution (Johan Hedberg)

This session was all about a real life case of a BizTalk Solution that required some optimization to improve latency.

They did the following things:

  • Reduce Messagebox hops
  • Using canonical processes
  • Caching data
  • Host separation, throttling,…
  • Using custom performance counters to identify problems
  • Optimize Persistance points

I can tell you one thing. Every project is different (different requirements,…). So be aware that these improvements are not always the silver bullet for every project.

Johan will also do a detailed version on Integration Mondays next week.

BizTalk Server tips and tricks for developers and admins (Sandro Pereira)

In this session Sandro talked about useful BizTalk tips, tricks and workarounds for developers & admins.
You can maybe remember the session from Tord last year. “Fight” between developers & admin.
So Sandro took the opportunity to take him back by writing some information into the eventlogs.

Sandro didn’t had enough time to cover everything. So check out his presentation when it’s online.

Power BI Tool (Tord Glad Nordahl)

Now we had the session from a BizTalk admin. But in this session Tord talked about PowerBI to make nice graphs.
PowerBI can be used for only $10 per month per user.

You can use different source like a sql db, csv files and many more. So in BizTalk you can use your dta db, bam information,…

And it’s always good if you can show some numbers to the managers. Managers like the numbers.

Tord will also do an extended version on our BTUG event in June.

Microservices and the Cloud-Based Future of Integration (Charles Young)

Charles gave us a very enthusiastic session around Microservices and the evolution of them.

One of the things he talked about was why the move from an ESB architecture to an Microservices architecture could be a good idea.
He also talked about how important it is to standardize the interfaces using SOAP & REST

Migrating to Microservices (Jon Fancey)

Jon started his session with some slides to convince the attendees to move from their on premise flows to microservices in the cloud.

He continued by explaining step by step equivalents between the cloud components and the on premise components:

  • Workflow –> Logic App
  • Maps –> BizTalk API App Transforms
  • BRE –> Rules API App
  • Pipelines –> Logic Apps where pipeline components are the API Apps

After that Dan Probert took over the session. He announced their new service : The Migration Factory.
They created a tool/process to convert a BizTalk msi to Logic Apps with their API Apps.
Due to technical limitations they make a report with the parts that they can convert and what can’t converted by them.

Api Management Part 1 – An Introduction to Azure API Management (Kent Weare)

Kent talked about the difference between an API and WebApi.
The key differences are:

  • HTTP
  • RESTful
  • JSON / XML
  • Swagger

Kent showed us a picture of an iceberg. You could only see the a little top above the water.
What does he mean with that? We don’t see that many APIs yet. The coming weeks/months/years we will see more and more exposed APIs.

The Azure API Management stuff started off when the race for API Management began within the business. Something i didn’t know was that Microsoft acquisitioned APIphany for that.

Kent gave us also i demo covering the things like:

  • Create API Management Stuff in the portal
  • Define Operations
  • Define Policies
  • API testing from the console
  • Show analytics
  • Enable caching
  • Rate Limiting
  • Security

Api Management Part 2 – Exposing agile BizTalk ESB itinerary services as APIs (Tomasso Groenendijk)

Tomasso did a session with API management with the BizTalk ESB Toolkit.
He also asked via twitter people to register on his portal for his demo.

He showed us/talked about some stuff :

  • API Management
  • Azure Websites
  • Azure SQL Database
  • BizTalk 360

An Azure of Things, a developer’s perspective (Nino Crudele)

Due train timings i couldn’t attend this session. I saw the session from Nino last year.
So i will definitely see the video of his session.



I hope you enjoyed reading the previous stuff? It’s probably the same as you can read on other blogs.
As we saw all the same sessions.
But i like to give my own view on it. If you have any questions, just ask.

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