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.

Locations all over the world

This is an amazing achievement, and I would like to thank all the local organizers, and of course my fellow global organizers.

The global organizers

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Looking back on 2017

Posted on January 2, 2018 by Eldert Grootenboer

Another year has gone by, and looking back, it has been an amazing year for me. The year started with becoming a MVP, for which I am thankful and honored. I want to once again thank everyone who has helped me reaching this astounding accomplishment, with special thanks going out to my buddy Steef-Jan, who has been like a mentor to me.

Became a MVP

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Integration Patterns In Azure – Message Router Using Service Bus

Posted on October 3, 2017 by Eldert Grootenboer

In the previous post, we have seen how we can implement the Message Router pattern when working with Logic Apps. As discussed, Logic Apps are a great fit if you have a limited set of endpoints to which you want to route the message, and if you have a need for various connectors. In this post we will look into another technology to implement this pattern, Azure Service Bus Topics. Topics are a great solution if we want to implement a publish / subscribe mechanism.

Capability to send our messages to one or more subscriptions in our topic.
Each subscription represents a virtual queue, from where subscribers can pull their messages, allowing receiving systems to process messages at their own speed.
Receiver and sender are completely decoupled, so systems can work independently from each other.
Topics have dead-lettering capabilities built in, so messages are not lost even in case of issues.
Easily add new subscriptions, so we can quickly on-board new systems.

Azure Service Bus Topics

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Integration Patterns In Azure – Message Router Using Logic Apps

Posted on September 4, 2017 by Eldert Grootenboer

When implementing software, it’s always a good idea to follow existing patterns, as these allow us to use proven and reliable techniques. The same applies in integration, where we have been working with integration patterns in technologies like BizTalk, MSMQ etc. These days we are working more and more with new technologies in Azure, giving us new tools like Service Bus, Logic Apps, and since recently Event Grid. But even though we are working with new tools, these integration patterns are still very useful, and should be followed whenever possible. This post is the first in a series where I will be showing how we can implement integration patterns using various services in Azure.