As more and more organizations begin to rely on the cloud for mission critical applications, the need for straightforward integration solutions will increase. In this chapter, we first saw how we can send messages from the cloud to our on-premises BizTalk Server with minimal effort. The majority of work we performed was around building a reusable WCF behavior that can validate tokens and overlay an authorization layer across our services. Prior to the availability of Windows Azure AppFabric, this sort of integration would have only been possible by either exposing BizTalk Server to the Internet through a reverse proxy, or, by using hardware/software to allow partners to directly access an internal service bus. Now, with minimal effort, we selectively exposed individual endpoints to any authorized, Internet-accessible client.
Besides just sending to the cloud, we also need the ability to consume cloud services. We saw that it was very easy to consume a cloud endpoint in the same way...