Looking back at 2014

Looking back at 2014

Close to  the end of the year 2014. It has again been quite a year from me, travelling to different places of our world. Some familiar and some new places. 2014 brought me to the following cities, area’s and countries:

  • United-Kingdom London.

  • Ireland Dublin.

  • Italy Tuscany, Emilia Romagna and Lombardia (Pisa, Lucca, Viareggio, Florence, Piacenza, Poggi Bonsi, San Gimignano, Volterra, Sienna, Valconasso di Pontenure, Podenzano, and Val Trebia).

  • United-States Washington State (Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Deception Pass, Whidbey Island, Fidalgo Island, Camano Island, and Bainbridge Island).

  • Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.

  • Australia Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland (Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney).

  • Spain Basque Country, Spanish Pyrenees (Girona, L’estartit, Vielha).

  • Norway Olso, Bergen.

  • Sweden Stockholm.
  • Belgium, Mechelen.

For one it has been a very busy year like last year 2013. To summarize all my activity bullet wise:

  • I have had multiple speaking engagements in the Netherlands and abroad (UK, Norway, Sweden, Belgium and Australia).

  • Attended the annual MVP Summit (November).

  • Attended the BizTalk Summit (INTEGRATE2014) in Redmond (December).

  • Technical reviewer for a number of books and white papers.

  • Watched dutch soccer perform well during the WorldCup 2014.

  • Written multiple TechNet wiki articles on BizTalk and ran two half Marathons, The Hague and Berlin, in March.

  • Written dozen blog posts on this blog (especially liked the ones on service virtualization I created with the help of Andrew Slikver/Nevatech) and on the TechNet Wiki Blog.

For me personally I am happy to finally been to Australia and had a great time speaking at three cities. I really like to thank Saravana Kumar, Dean Robertson, BizTalk360 and Mexia to make this possible. Both companies made a huge commitment and made a tremendous investment in the community. Besides BizTalk360 and Mexia there are some other companies that have shown a lot of affection to our integration (BizTalk) community like: Codit, Quicklearn and Bouvet.

After the event I had a great time with my friends Mikael Hakansson and Mick Badran. Both showing me the Aussie way of live. Thanks guys!

I am also happy to see that both Richard Seroter and Stephen W. Thomas, two of my other friends, welcomed a healthy, lovely daughter in their family lives: Charlotte and Haydon.

To conclude I have had an amazing year spending working on several integration projects, travelling, seeing the Seahawks become SuperBowl champs, seeing my kids grow up, spending time with the family, friends and of course the BizTalk community. Thanks everyone for reading my blog and I will continue to share my knowledge through speaking and writing in 2015.

Cheers,

Steef-Jan

Looking back at 2014

Close to the end of the year 2014. It has again been quite a year from me, travelling to different places of our world. Some familiar and some new places. 2014 brought me to the following cities, area’s and countries:

United-Kingdom London.

Ireland Dublin.

Italy Tuscany, Emilia Romagna and Lombardia (Pisa, Lucca, Viareggio, Florence, Piacenza, Poggi Bonsi, San Gimignano, Volterra,

BizTalk Developers Needed for a 6 Month Contract – 50%+ Remote

My current client is looking for a few additional BizTalk Developers to come work with us!  They could start as soon as next week.

This would be a 6 month contract.  The work is mostly remote (work from home) but travel to the client site up to 50% may be required.  All travel expenses would be paid by the client.  The rates are open and tend to be better than what I have seen in the past at some other clients.

This is a great opportunity for anyone to grow their BizTalk skills by working with a great team of veteran BizTalkers!

If interested, please email me at resume@biztalkgurus.com with your resume, availability, and requested rate.   

Look forward to working with you!

INTEGRATE 2014 – Journey to next generation of integration

INTEGRATE 2014 – Journey to next generation of integration

The beginning of december I visited the Microsoft Campus (Building 92) for the 3rd global BizTalk Summit, which was branded as Integrate2014. The event was organized this time by BizTalk360  along side with Microsoft itself and core partners like Quicklearn, Nevatech, Codit, and LogicalTech SysTalk. It was a three day event filled with numerous sessions by Microsoft themselves, a few MVP’s and partners.

The first important message to me, partners and end-users I believe was that BizTalk Server is going to play an essential role for integration systems and applications on-premise. Besides that its also provide support with connectivity to cloud (Azure with adapters that support SB-connectivity, and relay). That means BizTalk Server can also provide enterprises the ability to build cloud to ground or ground to cloud based solutions (see also Richard Seroter’s course on Pluralsight called Cloud Integration Patterns).  The product group explicitly shared that there will be future platform upgrades (full version, or R2). See also my post on the TechNet Wiki Blog: The Future of Integration.

Second even more important message was the new direction for BizTalk Services. MABS 1.0 will change course to adopt architecture called MicroServices. This means that MABS 2.0 will fundamentally change to support this architecture. What the architecture basically boils down to is that granularity will increase. A BizTalk Service solution can consist of many small services like connectors (called triggers and actions), mediation (that supports VETER pattern we know from MABS 1.0), BPM, Mappings, and Business Rule Engine (BRE). During the event we have seen different sessions on MicroServices from different speakers. All sessions were recorded and will be made available soon.

Finally the number of attendees and partners (sponsors) showed me that ecosystem of Microsoft Integration is very alive. Microsoft will continue to innovate it’s on-premise product BizTalk Server and it’s cloud based offering BizTalk Services, which will be named Azure BizTalk Microservices (MABS 2.0). We stand before the door to the next generation of integration solutions. We slowly we move (migrate) integration solution to Azure Platform and build new solutions to communicate with distributed systems (anywhere, anyplace, anytime) and devices.

Other blog post on INTEGRATE 2014 definitely worth to checkout are:

It has been an amazing event and it was awesome to meet with people like Microsoft Integration MVP’s present, Microsoft BizTalk Product Group, Biztalk360 Team, Quicklearn Team, Andrew Slivker (Nevatech), Jason Sander, Dwaine Gilmour, Mandi Ohlinger, Richard Broida, Tom Canter, Rob Fox, Jean Paul Smit, Martin Peters, Rene Brauwers, JoAnn Een, Michael Shea, Koen van Oost, Eldert Grootenboer, Rex van der Laan, Bart Scheurweghs, Rajesh Kolla, Howard Edidin, and list goes on.

BizTalk360 as event organizer have done an outstanding job taking the BizTalk Summit (Integrate) to the next level!

Cheers,

Steef-Jan

Integrate 2014 : My Thoughts

Published By: Bill Chesnut

It has now been just over a week since I attended the Integrate 2014 Conference at Building 92 on Microsoft’s Redmond Campus along with 2 other Mexia colleges Grant Samuels and Dan Toomey.

We were all set to hear about Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services 2.0, but from Scott Guthrie’s Keynote it was obvious we were going to get a different message, Integration needs to be a core component across all of Azure (and on premises with the Azure Pack for Windows Server 2012 R2). To that end we now have MicroServices (not an official name, but what everyone was referring to it as), more details about MicroServices later in my post. I think this concept of having integration across all of Azure is a good thing, BizTalk Services was more of a integration vertical in Azure where the vision for integration is a horizontal across all of the Azure technologies.

There will be a public preview of the new MicroServices in Q1 2015, expecting this to be early March 2015.

Things that I know about MicroServices so far:

  • They will run in a container like Azure Websites (most likely a renamed version of the current websites container)
  • The configuration to define how the MicroServices will be orchestrated/process flow will be JSON
  • There will be templates that allow you to define a generic process flow and then customize for a specific message flow
  • The MicroServices will expose their information via WADL/Swagger
  • There will be a market place were you can upload your MicroServices for others to use (free and chargeable)
  • There will be versioning, but no specifics on how it will work
  • There will be unit testing for MicroServices
  • BizTalk style Adapters will be implemented as MicroServices
  • MicroServices will be based on the Web API

Things that I don’t know about MicroServices so far:

  • What the cost to run them will be
  • How to debug MicroServices running in Azure
  • The exact payload going between the MicroServices (will it be common between all or unique between all)
  • What the conversion from MABS 1.0 to MicroServices will look like
  • What the conversion from BizTalk Server to MicroServices will look like
  • Not sure of the unit testing for a process/flow (multiple MicroServices)
  • Not sure of the automated deployment picture

During the Conference there were several session about MicroServices covering Business Rules, EAI and EDI the slides are available here: http://integrate2014.com/sessions/

For those that think MABS 1.0 is dead, they made it perfectly clear, MABS 1.0 is still a viable supported platform for it’s targeted workload, primarily EDI. To reinforces this, there was a presentation by Microsoft IT about their on-going migration from BizTalk Server to MABS, which is an extremely large migration.

Also, during Integrate 2014 there was also a couple of presentations on BizTalk Server where Microsoft confirmed the 2015 release of BizTalk Server, but there were few details on what would be in the 2015 release, other than BizTalk Server will continue to be the tool of choice in a Hybrid Integration Scenario. There was also a presentation about HCA health care’s use of BizTalk Server with some very impressive numbers of around 60 million message processed per day on a BizTalk Server configuration that consists of BizTalk Server 2010 and 2013 in 5 groups of 7 servers each (4 CPU with 16GB of RAM)

I would also like to thank BizTalk 360 and all the sponsors for making this great event possible.

Stay tune for more details around MicroServices

More …

Azure Camp 9 DEC 2014: quelques démos IoT + Big Data (vidéos)

Lors de l’Azure Camp du 9 décembre dernier, j’ai eu l’occasion de montrer quelques démos autour des objets connectés et de Big Data.

Je publie ici les vidéos de secours que j’avais préparées. Ce sont des versions un peu plus longues que ce que j’ai pu présenter.

 

Vous trouverez la vidéo de la session complète sur le sujet à http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Microsoft-Azure-France/Azure-Camp-9-DEC-2014-Lambda-Architecture

 

Mais revenons aux démos qui tournent autour de l’architecture suivante:

 

La première vidéo montre une vue d’ensemble de l’ingestion, du traitement en Storm et de la dataviz sans entrer dans le détail de la façon dont c’est fait.

 

Ensuite, on passe à Storm dans HDInsight:

 

puis à la DataViz en HTML5 et Excel avec d3js et SignalR:

 

Dans la démo Hortonworks, je montre comment on peut déployer la même topologie Storm sur un cluster Hadoop HDP fait de VMs linux installées initialement avec l’assistant de la markerplace Azure. On voit aussi comment on peut traiter les logs stockés dans le blob storage.

 

Ensuite, on montre qu’on peut aussi créer un cluster Cloudera, également via l’assistant de la marketplace Azure:

 

Arrivent ensuite les deux bases noSQL de la démo.

 

HBase:

 

et Datastax Enterprise / Cassandra en multi datacenter:

 

🙂

Benjamin (@benjguin)

Blog Post by: Benjamin GUINEBERTIERE

Integrate 2014: Thoughts on the Announcement of the BizTalk Microservices Platform

Integrate 2014: Thoughts on the Announcement of the BizTalk Microservices Platform

I will outline here some of my thoughts on Microsoft’s new venture in the EAI space, announced at the Integrate 2014 conference: the BizTalk Microservices Platform. I guess this could be called “BizTalk Services 2.0″. When I first heard the news, I was surprised. I didn’t attend the conference but had one eye on the […]
Blog Post by: James Corbould