Preface

Microsoft is investing heavily in Azure, its cloud computing platform. It's tempting to view this trend as a fad, but it is obvious that Microsoft is committed to this endeavor, and businesses are realizing the benefits of a platform that abstracts and manages the complex tasks of infrastructure management and application lifecycle management on its behalf, to name just a couple of offerings.

As the platform matures, more enterprises move their systems and workloads to the cloud. Software as a Service (SaaS) providers now offer rich services that companies are attracted to, in order to provide a competitive edge to their operations. Although many SaaS solutions can be customized to fit particular use cases, this is often limited out of the box (regardless of what the sales literature says!); customization for specific use cases is sacrificed for the benefits of a shared feature platform.

Many companies have decades of investment in on-premises solutions that are often heavily customized, and it is difficult to justify migrating to a new platform. In addition, there may be privacy concerns with storing sensitive data in the cloud.

Within this landscape, companies wish to extend the reach of their IT systems to the cloud while often key systems remain on-premises. Typically, enterprises also wish to introduce a degree of smart business process automation too. In this book, we demonstrate, with a practical "hands-on" approach, how these aspirations may be achieved by integrating the various disparate cloud-based and on-premises systems using the technologies available in Azure.

The book also seeks to show how cloud and on-premises systems may be integrated in a "robust" fashion, by ignoring the hype and instead drawing on lessons learned from integrating systems in the past.