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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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)

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

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.

Message Router Pattern

Continue reading →

Custom Subscribers In Azure Event Grid

Posted on August 23, 2017 by Eldert Grootenboer

After having shown how to send our custom events to Event Grid in my previous blog post, we will now see how we can create custom subscribers. Event Grid will be integrated with all Azure services, but by allowing us to create our own custom subscribers as well, we can truly route events to any service or application. And what’s more, we will also see how we can use the API to create a subscription from our subscriber, allowing us to quickly onboard new services, which can then start listening to the events which are of interest to them. In this sample, we will create an Azure API App, which will receive the events from our previous blog post, and store them in Azure Table Storage. On starting, the API App will check if the subscriptions it uses are created, and if not, it will create them and point them to the various endpoints the API App exposes.

Azure Event Grid

Continue reading →

Sending Custom Events To Azure Event Grid

Posted on August 23, 2017 by Eldert Grootenboer

In my previous post I showed how we can use the recently announced Event Grid service to integrate Azure services with each other. In this post, I will show how we can send custom events from any application or service into Event Grid, allowing us to integrate any service. My next post will show you in detail how we can subscribe to these custom events.