BizTalk in the cloud - Integration as a service

I totally missed it, but a rough two weeks ago it was published on the BizTalk Server Team Blog that the future is in the cloud.

When I attended the European BizTalk Conference and the sessions based on the book Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform, I got the feeling that Azure is something I should start working with. Now I'm sure that it is so. Especially since the BizTalk/Azure hybrid will be relased as a CTP sometime during the spring/summer of 2011.

As I concluded during the conference, it is at this point (and in the nearest future) not a replacement we have in front of us, but an addition of tools to build solutions with. The same is written by Daniel Probert in his blogpost on the subject.

I'm also happy to see that the cloud is not viewed as the "solution to everything". The future integration platform from Microsoft will be offered as an on-premises product based on AppFabric. I'm looking forward to this since I believe it will solve a lot of problems I'm facing today regarding complex low-latency processes that will work extremely well in an AppFabric on-site platform.

So regarding integration in the future, we now have a pretty clear direction to head in and I believe after reading the announcement from Microsoft that it is the right path. Since most of the platform is going to the cloud, so should also the integration, while still having an option to keep things off-cloud if security, performance and other requirements dictate so.

European BizTalk Conference recap

I'm back at the office after two days at Microsoft in Stockholm and the European BizTalk Conference where I enjoyed myself together with another 150 attendees. A good event as always with the BizTalk User Group Sweden and great sessions that mostly covered the platform around BizTalk for a change.

The three speakers, Richard Seroter, Stephen W. Thomas and Ewan Fairweather, are three of the five authors of the recently published book Applied architecture patterns on the Microsoft platform, which in turn caused the event to follow the basic chapter layout of the book (a book I will review as soon as I have browsed through my copy).

Day one consisted to a large extent of sessions on the different technologies that are available. SQL Server, BizTalk 2010, AppFabric, Azure and WF 4.0 were covered. Day two had sessions covering scenarios where each of the technologies were used in the solution. On this second day, StreamInsight was used in a presentation as well as the last technology presented at the conference. All sessions got taped and so videos should be up on the net within a few weeks I presume.

A very important lesson learned at the conference was a discussion on the anxiety of BizTalk developers considering all this new technology emerging. The speakers made a strong point that BizTalk is not to be replaced by AppFabric, WF 4.0, StreamInsight, SQL Server functionality and whatever there might be. All this new technology can and will instead be used as a complement to BizTalk in order to leverage functionality that previously was hard or impossible to pull off using solely the BizTalk platform. A good example of this was shown in the StreamInsight session with a vast amount of data being streamed and analyzed in realtime.

All in all, a good two days with the crème de la crème of BizTalkers in the region as well as a few from further away in the world.