API Management CI/CD using ARM Templates – Linked template

Posted on June 4, 2018 by Eldert Grootenboer

This is the fifth and final post in my series around setting up CI/CD for Azure API Management using Azure Resource Manager templates. We already created our API Management instance, added products, users and groups to the instance, and created unversioned and versioned APIs. In this final post, we will see how we can use linked ARM templates in combination with VSTS to deploy our solution all at once, and how this allows us to re-use existing templates to build up our API Management.

The posts in this series are the following, this list will be updated as the posts are being published.

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API Management CI/CD using ARM Templates – Versioned API

Posted on May 28, 2018 by Eldert Grootenboer

This is the fourth post in my series around setting up CI/CD for Azure API Management using Azure Resource Manager templates. So far we have created our API Management instance, added the products, users and groups for Contoso, and created an unversioned API. In this post we will create an versioned API, allowing us to run multiple versions of an API side by side.

The posts in this series are the following, this list will be updated as the posts are being published.

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API Management CI/CD using ARM Templates – Unversioned API

Posted on May 21, 2018 by Eldert Grootenboer

This is the thirth post in my series around setting up CI/CD for Azure API Management using Azure Resource Manager templates. In the first post we created our API Management instance, and have set up our build and release pipelines, while in the second post we added the products, users and groups for Contoso. In this post we will create an unversioned API , and expose it through the product from the previous post.

The posts in this series are the following, this list will be updated as the posts are being published.

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Azure Event Hubs and Apache Kafka, a match made in messaging heaven

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Eldert Grootenboer

Last week Microsoft announced during Build that they are now supporting the Kafka protocol 1.0 and onward on Azure Event Hubs. This allows us to connect our Kafka clients, which can be either producers or consumers, to Event Hubs and take advantage of all features which Event Hubs gives us, like easy integration to Azure services including Stream Analytics, Functions and Logic Apps, use Capture and auto-inflate, and tie into Azure core features like MSI, RBAC and Virtual Networks.

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API Management CI/CD using ARM Templates – Products, users and groups

Posted on May 14, 2018 by Eldert Grootenboer

This is the second post in my series around setting up CI/CD for Azure API Management using Azure Resource Manager templates. In the previous post we created our API Management instance, and have set up our build and release pipelines. In this post we will add custom products, users and groups to our API Management instance, which will be used to set up our policies and access to our APIs.

The posts in this series are the following, this list will be updated as the posts are being published.

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Working with CloudEvents in Azure Event Grid

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Eldert Grootenboer

Recently Microsoft announced Azure Event Grid, a highly scalable serverless event driven offering allowing us to implement publish and subscribe patterns. Event driven scenarios are becoming more common by the day, which means that we see these type of integrations increasing a lot as well. A lot of times applications will define their own message formats for their events, however, with the recent announcement of native support in Azure Event Grid for CloudEvents our lives should be made a lot easier. CloudEvents is a standard for working with events accross platforms, and gives us a specification for describing event data in a common way. This will allow any platform or application which is working with events, to implement a common format, allowing easy integration and interoperability, for example between Azure, AWS and Oracle. The specification is still under active development, and Microsoft is one of the big contributors, especially Clemens Vasters, Lead Architect on Azure Messaging Services.

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API Management CI/CD using ARM Templates – API Management Instance

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Eldert Grootenboer

This is the first in a series of blogposts around setting up CI/CD for Azure API Management using Azure Resource Manager templates. We will be using Visual Studio Team Services to host our repositories and set up our build and release pipeline. By using CI/CD our API Management will be updated any time we check in changes made in our ARM templates.

The posts in this series are the following, this list will be updated as the posts are being published.

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Microsoft Azure becomes Magic Quadrant leader in Enterprise iPaaS

Posted on April 25, 2018 by Eldert Grootenboer

Last week the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (EiPaaS) was published, listing Microsoft in the coveted leader space. Having worked with Azure’s iPaaS products for a long time now, I wholeheartedly agree with this decision, and congratulate all the teams within Microsoft who have been working so hard to get to where we are today. The complete report, with all requirements and results can be found in this report.

Source: Gartner (April 2018)

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Correlating messages over Logic Apps using Service Bus

Posted on April 9, 2018 by Eldert Grootenboer

When working with Azure Logic Apps, I like to have each Logic App do a single piece of work, as this allows us to mix and match these Logic Apps in various flows. For this demo, we will be using a very simple representation of this, where we have one Logic App which receives the message and send back a response to the original caller, another Logic App which does transformation of the message, and finally a Logic App which calls a backend system. To decouple these Logic Apps we will be using Azure Service Bus topics, providing us with routing capabilities and allowing us to handle downtime more easily.

Architecture

Now the challenge we were running into, is that we needed to give the response which we received from the backend, back as a response to the client.

Requested architecture

Of course, since we have implemented communication between the Logic Apps asynchronously and decoupled by using Service Bus in between, we don’t have a return channel on which we can send the response. In this post, I will show how we can solve this by using Service Bus sessions.

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Global Integration Bootcamp 2018

Posted on March 26, 2018 by Eldert Grootenboer

Last Saturday was the second edition of the Global Integration Bootcamp, and we can certainly say it was another big hit! In total we had 15 locations in 12 countries running the Bootcamp, and about 600 participants including the speakers.