Today at TechEd US in Orlando, it was good to hear Scott Guthrie during his foundation session: Windows Azure Today and Tomorrow, mention BizTalk as a possible workload that could be hosted in the new Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) feature released last week. The new IaaS feature opens many possibilities for those workloads that are not easy to host in a Azure web or worker role; allowing them to move from your data centre to Azure. Some of the primary uses that I can see for BizTalk running in Azure IaaS are:
- Rapid POC of BizTalk solutions without the assistance of the client’s infrastructure group
- Rapid provisioning of BizTalk Developer environments with the use of the Azure IaaS virtual machine templating feature
- Occasional Demoing of BizTalk solutions, the IaaS virtual machine are only charged while running, otherwise you pay only for the storage of the VHD files in Azure Storage.
The use of BizTalk in the cloud will be further enhanced with the release of BizTalk 2010 R2 (Scheduled for release approximately 6 months after Windows 8)
To view Scott Guthrie complete session on Windows Azure Today and Tomorrow, it can be found on Channel9 at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/FDN05