Nieuwe blog post op het motion CTO blog: Past uw bedrijfsproces wel bij het klantproces?
Cheers, Gijs
Past uw bedrijfsproces wel bij het klantproces?
May 14th, 2012Presentation at the 5th SOA & Cloud Symposium, London 9/24
May 9th, 2012I’ll be presenting “Federated ESB with Microsoft Azure - Architecture & Patterns” at the 5th International SOA & Cloud Symposium in London on September 24th.
The abstract of the presentation is:
With the move to mass-market, multi-tenant SaaS solutions, integration will become even more important than it is today. Now companies can start to deliver their value add to customers not only by building tailor-made solutions anymore, but by leveraging smart combinations of cloud-based offerings.
Gartner stated that SOA is a bridge from traditional computing in the enterprise data center to the hybrid model of computing, engaging enterprise data center and cloud resources. This presentation will provide insight and guidance on how to choose Microsoft integration solutions and how to combine them to create integration architectures that can be applied to PaaS and SaaS models.
Questions raised and addressed during this session include:
• “How do I integrate my back-end systems with multi-tenant SaaS applications?”
• “How do I create composite services that are orchestrated services provided by multiple SaaS applications or even SaaS vendors?”
• “Should I use integration middleware in the cloud (PaaS) to integrate my on-premise applications?”
• “What does hybrid integration architecture look like and how do I manage such an environment?”
Additionally, various Microsoft platform technologies are discussed in relation to cloud computing, including BizTalk Server, Windows Azure Service Bus, and Federated (hybrid) ESB. Enterprise Integration Patterns and SOA Design Principles are further covered in relation to these technologies.
September 24, 2012 - 14:15
The full conference agenda can be found here: http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/agenda2012.php
Synchronous integration is a myth
May 2nd, 2012Once in a while, as an integration architect you’ll get into discussions with customers about the infamous synchronous versus asynchronous integration topic. When integrating a frontend (let’s say, SharePoint Enterprise Portal) with (a combination of) backend system(s), people tend to complain about the fact that BizTalk Server cannot handle that integration in a synchronous fashion. That is, from frontend to backend all integration is handled within one request-reply thread, in order to have the lowest latency possible.
In practice, pure synchronous integration is however not possible - with any integration layer. It is in fact a myth.
You know why? 99% of all transactions are ending in database queries (CRUD; create, read, update, delete) and these queries are executed by database engines, which by their very nature are doing their job asynchronously. The database client layer is asynchronously connected to the server layer. Therefore, pure synchronous integration is not possible at all.
Of course that could sound to some people as a lame excuse, but I often use it to illustrate the issue.
Now, how can we implement BizTalk as an ESB, to act as an abstract integration layer without adding too much latency? BizTalk in these cases actually works in a “synchronous over asynchronous” fashion, and by properly tuning the hosts or host instances in which these integration processes are running, BizTalk can provide near-realtime latency in a scalable fashion. The latter is important to notice, because this is almost impossible to accomplish without using an (asynchronous) integration layer inbetween, without overrunning the backend systems.
A nice topic for Myth Busters? 
Cheers, Gijs
Service Technology Magazine article on integration with Microsoft
April 25th, 2012My article on guidance for and the future of integration with Microsoft published in the April issue of Thomas Erl’s Service Technology Magazine.
Cheers, Gijs
