Published By: Bill Chesnut
It has now been just over a week since I attended the Integrate 2014 Conference at Building 92 on Microsoft’s Redmond Campus along with 2 other Mexia colleges Grant Samuels and Dan Toomey.
We were all set to hear about Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services 2.0, but from Scott Guthrie’s Keynote it was obvious we were going to get a different message, Integration needs to be a core component across all of Azure (and on premises with the Azure Pack for Windows Server 2012 R2). To that end we now have MicroServices (not an official name, but what everyone was referring to it as), more details about MicroServices later in my post. I think this concept of having integration across all of Azure is a good thing, BizTalk Services was more of a integration vertical in Azure where the vision for integration is a horizontal across all of the Azure technologies.
There will be a public preview of the new MicroServices in Q1 2015, expecting this to be early March 2015.
Things that I know about MicroServices so far:
- They will run in a container like Azure Websites (most likely a renamed version of the current websites container)
- The configuration to define how the MicroServices will be orchestrated/process flow will be JSON
- There will be templates that allow you to define a generic process flow and then customize for a specific message flow
- The MicroServices will expose their information via WADL/Swagger
- There will be a market place were you can upload your MicroServices for others to use (free and chargeable)
- There will be versioning, but no specifics on how it will work
- There will be unit testing for MicroServices
- BizTalk style Adapters will be implemented as MicroServices
- MicroServices will be based on the Web API
Things that I don’t know about MicroServices so far:
- What the cost to run them will be
- How to debug MicroServices running in Azure
- The exact payload going between the MicroServices (will it be common between all or unique between all)
- What the conversion from MABS 1.0 to MicroServices will look like
- What the conversion from BizTalk Server to MicroServices will look like
- Not sure of the unit testing for a process/flow (multiple MicroServices)
- Not sure of the automated deployment picture
During the Conference there were several session about MicroServices covering Business Rules, EAI and EDI the slides are available here: http://integrate2014.com/sessions/
For those that think MABS 1.0 is dead, they made it perfectly clear, MABS 1.0 is still a viable supported platform for it’s targeted workload, primarily EDI. To reinforces this, there was a presentation by Microsoft IT about their on-going migration from BizTalk Server to MABS, which is an extremely large migration.
Also, during Integrate 2014 there was also a couple of presentations on BizTalk Server where Microsoft confirmed the 2015 release of BizTalk Server, but there were few details on what would be in the 2015 release, other than BizTalk Server will continue to be the tool of choice in a Hybrid Integration Scenario. There was also a presentation about HCA health care’s use of BizTalk Server with some very impressive numbers of around 60 million message processed per day on a BizTalk Server configuration that consists of BizTalk Server 2010 and 2013 in 5 groups of 7 servers each (4 CPU with 16GB of RAM)
I would also like to thank BizTalk 360 and all the sponsors for making this great event possible.
Stay tune for more details around MicroServices