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.
Chapter 1 , An Introduction to Systems Integration in the Cloud, introduces the concept of cloud computing and modern integration using the Azure cloud platform.
Chapter 2 , What Is an Azure App Service?, explores Azures Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering for a building and managing applications aka Azure App Service.
Chapter 3 , Getting Started with API Apps, demonstrates how to build a robust, scalable, secure, and easy-to-use API backend to be consumed by your web, logic, or mobile app (or any third-party application hosted outside of App Service).
Chapter 4 , What is Azure API Management, shows how to control and manage API assets using Azure API Management (APIM).
Chapter 5 , Trigger Your First Logic App in Azure, is a first look at constructing workflows in the cloud using Logic Apps, to achieve smart business process automation quickly with no coding required.
Chapter 6 , Working with Connectors in Logic Apps, provides an introduction to connectors that abstract away the complexities of directly interacting with a third-party API or data source, using prebuilt functionality provided by Microsoft. Learn how to create your own custom connector!
Chapter 7 , Azure Functions in Logic Apps, looks into the hot topic of serverless computing by demonstrating how to build a function app and calling a function from a Logic App, to chain functionality and build complex workflows.
Chapter 8 , A Deep Dive into Logic Apps, is a more in-depth look at Logic Apps, exploring advanced features such as control flow, looping, and exception handling.
Chapter 9 , Powerful Integration with SaaS Using Logic Apps, shows how to hook up to Software as a Service (SaaS) providers using specialized Logic App connectors and how to leverage SaaS solutions in new and interesting ways to support unique business processes.
Chapter 10 , Advanced Integration with Powerful, Scalable Service Bus in the Cloud, is a deep dive into Azure Service Bus, and this chapter demonstrates how to build loosely coupled and scalable integrations using this technology.
Chapter 11 , Connecting to Event Hubs and an Introduction to IoT Hubs, provides an introduction to connecting disparate devices in Azure using IoT Hubs and processing large amounts of device data using Event Hubs.
Chapter 12 , EAI/B2B Integration Using Logic Apps, introduces Enterprise Integration Pack, which is an Enterprise level set of features that extends Logic Apps to support common business scenarios such as B2B communication using XML, mapping between different message formats, and transmission protocols such as AS2.
Chapter 13 , Hybrid Integration Using BizTalk Server 2016 and Logic Apps, introduces the reality that many businesses wish to not only leverage existing on-premises systems but also utilize SaaS applications (such as CRM Online). Using BizTalk Server 2016, this section demonstrates how to build a hybrid integration to do this, pairing with Logic Apps.
Chapter 14 , Tooling and Monitoring for Logic Apps, looks into options after you have built your Logic App, to deploy your workflow in Azure and then ongoing monitoring and alerting features.
Chapter 15 , What's Next for Azure Integration?, discusses Microsoft's future roadmap for integration using Azure and touches on Flow, the lightweight version of Logic Apps.
The practical examples found in this book require an Azure subscription. It is possible to sign up for a free trial account via the Azure website, https://azure.microsoft.com/ .
Other examples in the book may require a subscription to a particular SaaS provider; further details are provided in the relevant section.
This book is for software developers, architects, and technical managers who wish to explore using Azure to connect cloud-based and on-premises systems. No prior knowledge of cloud computing and Azure is assumed.
It is expected that the reader has familiarity with the C# programming language and the JSON message exchange format. Code examples in this book use C# and JSON.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "the code PD30 specifies that payment was past due by 30 days and COLL indicates that the account was referred to a debt collection agency."
A block of code is set as follows:
public static string SharedAccessSignatureTokenProvider.GetSharedAccessSignature(string keyName, string sharedAccessKey, string resource, TimeSpan tokenTimeToLive)
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
public static string SharedAccessSignatureTokenProvider.GetSharedAccessSignature(string keyName, string sharedAccessKey, string resource, TimeSpan tokenTimeToLive)
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "click on the SQL databases option and click on Add to create new SQL database instance."
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