Azure App Service

Atomic Integration

gindafieldLeave a comment

Atomic Integration, I like the term. And I like the concept. Of course it has disadvantages, but don’t the advantages outweigh these? Let’s explore.

When the Integration Monday session “The fall of the BizTalk architect” (by Mikael Sand) was announced I was immediately triggered. It was the combination of the title and the presenter (Mikael often rocks) that made me create a note to self to watch it later on. And finally I did. And it triggered me to write this blog post.

For years we have been telling our customers that spaghetti is bad and lasagna is good. And we’ve also been telling them that re-use is the holy grail. And that by putting a service bus in the middle that everything becomes more manageable, integrations have shorter time to market and the whole application landscape becomes more reliable.

But at the same time, we see that re-use is very hard to accomplish, there are so many dependencies between solutions and that realizing this in an agile manner is a nightmare if not managed meticulously. Especially if we need to deliver business value quickly, talking about createing stuff for later re-use and having depencies on other teams is a hard sell to the product owner and thus the business.

Another thing that is really hard with any integration archtitecture and the accompanying middleware with its frameworks that have been built on top of the actual middleware (and thus becoming a part of that middleware) is ownership. And that is a two-headed beast. First of all, ownership of the frameworks that run on top of the middleware, and second the ownership of the actual integrations.

The first one is already a hard nut to crack. Who pays for maintaining these frameworks? Does it get financed by projects? Very hard to sell. Does it have a separate (business) owner and funds? Never seen that before and it probably wouldn’t work because the guy that pays most gets his way and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the framework will be the best usable framework of all times.

The second one is even harder to manage. Who is typically the owner of an integration. The subscriber and thus the receiver of information? Or is it the sender a.k.a. the publisher of the information? Who pays for it? Is that the owner? And will he be managing it? And what happens if the ingration makes use of all kinds of other, re-usable custom features that get changed over time and in which the actual owner of the ingration is not interested at all?

Why indeed not do more copy-and-paste instead of inherit or re-use? The owner of the specific integration is completely responsible for it and can change, fork and version whatever he likes. And as Mikael says in his presentation: TFS or Visual Studio Online is great for finding out who uses certain code and inform them if a bug has been solved in some copied code (segment). And of course we still design and build integrations according to the well known integration patterns that have become our best friends. Only, we don’t worry that much about optimization anymore, because the platform will take care of that. Just like we had to get used to garbage collectors and developers not knowing what memfree() actually means, we need to get used to computing power and cheap storage galoring and therefore don’t need to bother about redundancy in certain steps in an integration anymore.

With the arrival of cloud computing (more specifically PaaS) and big data, I think we now get into an era when this actually is becoming possible and at the same time manageable. The PaaS offerings by Microsoft, specifically Azure App Service, are becoming an interesting environment quickly. Combined with big data (which to me in this scenario is: Just save a much information about integration runs as possible, because we have cheap storage anyway and we’ll see what we’ll do with this data later), runtime insight, correlation and debugging capabilities are a breeze. Runtime governance: Check. We don’t need frameworks anymore and thus we don’t need an owner anymore.

Azure App Service, in combination with the big data facilities and the analytics services are all we need. And it is a perfect fit for Atomic Integration.

Cheers, Gijs

Is Azure App Service about Integration?

gindafieldLeave a comment

Today and tomorrow is the BizTalk Summit in London (#BizTalkSummit2015). BizTalk is about integration. The summit is about the launch of BizTalk Services as part of the Azure App Service offering. Since the first talks about offering a Microservices platform during the Integration Summit in Redmond in December last year, I’ve started thinking about and struggeling with integration versus application development. There has traditionally always been a fine line between application development and integration. When implementing pure, messaging only based transformation, routing and protocol adaptation, we’re basically talking about integration. This is used to convey information from one application to the other in order for them to work with less or completely without manual copying of information. When adding orchestration and business rules, master data services, apps and portals access we’re more and more talking about application development. The application mostly being a composition of functions provided by silo’d application and SOA services. And sometimes adding more modern stuff like REST services to the composition.

Gartner has released its latest Magic Quadrant on Enterprise Application Platform as a Service earlier this year. To them, Azure App Service is (part of) an aPaaS platform. They define aPaaS as:

“Application infrastructure functionality, enriched with cloud characteristics and offered as a service, is platform as a service (PaaS). Gartner refers to it more precisely as cloud application infrastructure services. Application platform as a service (aPaaS) is a form of PaaS that provides a platform to support application development, deployment and execution in the cloud. It is a suite of cloud services designed to meet the prevailing application design requirements of the time, and, in 2015, includes mobile, cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data analytics innovations.”

Especially the part “a platform to support application development, deployment and execution in the cloud” triggered me to write this blog post. When looking at the functionalities that should be provided by such platforms, integration is of course one of the capabilities. And integration comes in many forms. But, are these capabilities features that should be used to recreate legacy ways of application integration? Or are these functionalities provided to build moderns applications, based on – yes I dare to use the term again, even though Microsoft stopped using it since last month when talking about the Azure App Service – Microservices?

To me it is clear, Azure App Sevice is an application platform providing the tools and runtime services to quickly build modern, distributed solutions. Modern, because it uses APIs. APIs should be used, because Data Services, 3rd party APIs and SaaS Applications are built on that paradigm. And that paradigm facilitates agile solution development and quick time to market. Creating a modern, distributed, composite solution is using all the different building blocks provided by the aPaaS platform and the SaaS applications, Data Services and 3rd party APIs (for example the ones listed in programmableweb.com or the Azure Marketplace).

In my opinion, we should only use public cloud based legacy integration paradigms for hybrid purposes. That is, bridging on-prem soap services to cloud based API integration layers. We should not bother about providing traditional EAI and B2B like integration paradigms. Forget about Batching EDI messages, transaction scopes and stuff like that. I’d say, just boycot that in the public cloud. Just rely on idempotency of the independently deployed APIs. And provide an on-premises server solution for the legacy integration stuff. We shouldn’t be building ESBs in aPaaS. We should be building distributed solutions based on modern paradigms.

Let’s use this hammer (or nail gun, as Mikael Sand called it :-)) to handle nails. And let’s all figure out quickly what these nails can look like and what we can build with them. Maybe we should first find consensus on anti-patterns for Azure App Service within the large community we have.

Cheers, Gijs