Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – July 2017

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – July 2017

After the previous Logic Apps live webcast back in May 2017, the team were back just in time for their webcast on July 26, 2017 – a day before Logic Apps went Generally Available (GA) one year ago! Yes, Azure Logic Apps officially turns 1!! A huge round of applause and shout out to the team at Microsoft for giving a great product offering. This episode of Logic Apps live webcast had Jeff Hollan, Kevin Lam and Jon Fancey giving the recent updates that have rolled into the product.

Happy Birthday Logic Apps! You’ve turned 1 and have a long way to go!

New York Hackathon – September 5, 2017

The Logic Apps team is conducting a very unique, first of its kind Hackathon event on September 5, 2017 at Microsoft Times Square office in Downtown, Washington. This hackathon will focus on Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Azure App Services, API Management and more. If you are interested to attend this hackathon, send the Logic Apps team a Tweet (DM), email.

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

  1. Export Logic App in Visual Studio – When you open a Logic App from Cloud Explorer in Visual Studio, you can export the Logic App to your Visual Studio project. This will create a file on your file system of the Logic App as an ARM template. You can import this template into the Visual Studio and start using your Logic App within Visual Studio.
  2. Webhooks in Foreach loop – Previously, it was possible to have Webhooks across the Logic App and now the functionality has been extended to the Foreach loop. You can have as many Webhooks in your foreach loop.
  3. Service Principal Authentication (Azure Data Lake and ARM) – If you are using any resource templates, one of the biggest challenges with some OAuth connectors is that you have to give your consent by signing up and giving Logic Apps the permission to access your connection details. This is a challenge when there are numerous deployments. Instead, now when you try to connect to Azure Resource Manager or Azure Data Lake, you can now connect using the Azure Application Service Principal. All you have to do is provide a secret key that has access to the application. Soon, this functionality will roll out to Office365 connectors, Dynamics connectors and SharePoint connectors.

  4. Array handling in designer – Let’s say you have a situation where you have an output from one of the Logic App steps and you want to input the actual array object instead of the actual elements, this operation is now possible in the Logic Apps designer. This is best implemented now in the “Send Email” step where you can add multiple attachments as an array.
  5. Batch Processing – Jon Fancey demonstrated this functionality at INTEGRATE 2017 where users can group things together (arbitrarily).
  6. Variable decrement – In addition to initialize and increment (discussed in the earlier Logic Apps Live webcast), and the Set functionality explained here, the Logic Apps team have added the “decrement” capability to variables. The team will be adding support for more variable types in the coming weeks/months.
  7. Run history compressed view – When you click the Run History section, you will see a compressed view of the actual run history that lists the failed runs for you to easily act upon.
  8. Run API time-range filter – You can now filter the runs based on the time-range (say, between two date range times)
  9. Action Configuration settings (splitOn, retry policy, timeout, sequential flag, disable async polling) – All these operations (that are configurable) can now be performed right from the Logic Apps Designer in the Trigger Configuration settings.
  10. Pan and zoom within the Designer
  11. Server side paging (eg., SQL) – For instance, SQL has a page size limit of 256 rows in a request. Say, when you query more than 256 rows, only the first 256 rows would be fetched from the database. Now you can enable Server Side Paging from the Designer where there is a configurable value and you can retrieve the number of rows depending on the value that is configured.
  12. Expression Authoring – You can build your expression functions from the designer, and all other expressions are listed right in the Designer. It becomes easy for you to find the expressions.
  13. Smart tips – There are hints now available in the Logic Apps Designer that will remind you to perform a very important action.
  14. XSLT Byte Order Mark config – When you use the Transform action, you will normally get back the XML and along with it, you will receive the byte order mark. The Logic Apps team has now in fact cleaned the code in such a way that you can now opt out from receiving those byte order mark in addition to the XML.
  15. Open Sourced Templates – You can submit New / update the existing Templates at github.com/azure/logicapps. The Logic Apps team will review the templates and publish them accordingly.

New Connectors

  • Azure File Storage – You can now access your blob attached storage from/to your VM
  • ARM Invoke and Service Principal – The ARM Invoke is super powerful. For any Azure Resource that you have access to, you can easily Start/Stop the VM, etc.
  • Azure Application Insights – This connector allows you to queue up reports and run queries to get the App Insights report
  • Video Indexer
  • Microsoft Planner
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Microsoft Forms
  • Bing Maps
  • Bing Search
  • Adobe Creative Cloud
  • Parserr
  • Calendly
  • Teamwork
  • JotForm
  • Freshservice
  • Pitney Bowes
  • AWeber
  • Cognito Forms
  • Team Work
  • PostreSQL

What’s in Progress?

  1. Large Files – Ability to move large files up to 1 GB (between) for specific connectors (blob, FTP)
  2. SOAP – One of the most requested features on UserVoice. Once available, you will be able to consume SOAP services (both cloud and on-premise)
  3. Expression Intellisense – Logic Apps workflow definitions will incorporate the same code used by Microsoft Visual Studio
  4. Expression tracing – With this capability, you can actually get to see the intermediate values for complex expressions
  5. Foreach nesting in the designer – This was a backend capability that was recently released but this capability will soon be incorporated into the designer.
  6. Foreach failure navigation – Say, you have about 1000 iterations in the foreach loop and 5 of them actually failed, you have to look for which one actually failed. Instead, you can navigate to the next failed action inside a for each loop easily to see what happened.
  7. Functions + Swagger
  8. Logic Apps OMS Package – You can monitor all the Logic Apps using a B2B solution within the Operations Management Suite (OMS). The preview of this OMS dashboard will be available within the next month (before next Logic Apps live webcast). You can bulk resubmit at the same time.

  9. Variables append (capability)
  10. Publish Logic Apps to PowerApps and Flow in a easy way
  11. Export Flow to Logic App ARM template
  12. Code view peek in the Action
  13. Time based batching
  14. Upcoming Connectors
    1. Azure Tables
    2. Azure SQL Data Warehouse
    3. Service Now
    4. Workday
    5. Feedly
    6. MySQL (RW)
    7. Amazon Redshift

You can watch the recording of this session here
[embedded content]

Community Events Logic Apps team are a part of

  1. Integration Bootcamp on September 21-22, 2017 at Charlotte, North Carolina. This event will focus on BizTalk, Azure Logic Apps, Azure API Management and lots more.
  2. INTEGRATE 2017 USA – October 25 – 27, 2017 at Redmond. Register for the event today.

Why attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event?

Jim Harrer (Pro Integration Team Program Manager, Microsoft) and Saravana Kumar (Founder/CTO – BizTalk360) give you a heads up as to why you have to attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event.

Feedback

If you are working on Logic Apps and have something interesting, feel free to share them with the Azure Logic Apps team via email or you can tweet to them at @logicappsio. You can also vote for features that you feel are important and that you’d like to see in logic apps here.

The Logic Apps team are currently running a survey to know how the product/features are useful for you as a user. The team would like to understand your experiences with the product. You can take the survey here.

If you ever wanted to get in touch with the Azure Logic Apps team, here’s how you do it!
Reach Out Azure Logic Apps Team

Previous Updates

In case you missed the earlier updates from the Logic Apps team, take a look at our recap blogs here –

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

INTEGRATE 2017 – BizTalk360 Partner & Product Specialist of the Year Awards

INTEGRATE 2017 – BizTalk360 Partner & Product Specialist of the Year Awards

During the course of INTEGRATE 2017, BizTalk360 Founder/CTO Saravana Kumar presented the Partner of the Year (2016) and Product Specialist awards to companies and technical leaders who have showcased and demonstrated expertise with the BizTalk360 product over the last year. We started this tradition in the BizTalk Summit 2015 and INTEGRATE 2016 events and the trend continues.

BizTalk360 Partner of the Year 2016 Awards

The Partner of the Year 2016 award was bagged by Codit from Netherlands, Solidsoft Reply from UK, and Evry from Sweden.

INTEGRATE 2017 Awards - PartnerINTEGRATE 2017 Awards - Partner

Product Specialist Of The Year 2016 Awards

BizTalk360 recognized the efforts of people who have proven their history of implementation of the product over the past year. The program recognizes these exceptional contributions by allowing product specialists early access to products and a forum for providing feedback. This year, we are extremely happy to present this award to 15 people –

  • Bart Scheurweghs
  • David Grospelier
  • Daniel Toomey
  • Daniel Wilen
  • Maarit Laine
  • Eldert Grootenboer
  • Eva De Jong
  • Joakim Wadskog
  • Jordy Maes
  • Kent Weare
  • Kien Pham
  • Maxime Delwaide
  • Milen Koychev
  • Nicolas Blatter
  • Steef – Jan Wiggers

We would like to thank all our Partners and Product Specialists for their efforts towards improving the reach of BizTalk360 to customers.

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

INTEGRATE 2017 – Recap of Day 3

INTEGRATE 2017 – Recap of Day 3

After a scintillating Day 1 and Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2017, the stage was perfectly set for the last (Day 3) day of the event. Before you proceed further, we recommend you to take a read at the following links –

Quick Links

Session 1 – Rethinking Integration by Nino Crudele

Day 3 at INTEGRATE 2017 started off with the “Brad Pitt of the Integration Community” – Nino Crudele. It was a perfect start to the last day of this premier integration focused conference.

Nino started off his session by thanking his mentor, a fellow MVP for instilling knowledge about Power BI. This session was based on true experience. Nino shared his experience of how he calls the job as his passion with three different types of jobs – Bizzy (BizTalk), DEFCON1, and Chicken Way. In this context, what Nino refers to the Chicken way is the way in which you can actually solve the problem – you can take a direct or an indirect approach to solve the problem.

Nino even had some Chicken Way Red Cards to give away to the community and some reactions to that were –

Then Nino presented the most comical slide of the entire #Integrate2017 event – a question / answer from his 12-year old daughter about BizTalk.

The above slide shows how people perceive the technology actually. Therefore, it’s imperative that you have to choose the proper technology to solve the specific problem and make the customer happy. Nino also explained what according to him are the top technology stacks and made a mention that “BizTalk is SOLID” – a very solid technology platform.

Then Nino gave an example of his customer experience where the customers were using 15 BizTalk Servers! :O Nino suggested changes to certain approaches in their business process, and the way to get the real time performance improvement. The customer was also looking for a real fast hybrid integration (point to point) with BizTalk in the project with real time monitoring, tracing and so on. Nino suggested a framework that was completely built over the cloud. This approach was more reliable and the customer had complete control over the messaging system, scalable and so on. The solution made use of Logic App, Event Hubs, Service Bus, Blob storage and many more such integration solutions which made the customer happy.

The session moved into a cool demo from Nino (real time data visualization in Power BI using custom visualization) which you can get to watch when the videos go Live on the INTEGRATE 2017 website.

Session 2 – Moving to Cloud-Native Integration by Richard Seroter

The second session of the day was from Richard Seroter on Moving to Cloud-Native Integration. Richard started off his talk with the analogy of “theory of constraints” where processes are limited to throughput by the constraint (bottleneck). In any software environment, you have to focus on what is the constraint that is slowing you down and optimize it. In an organization environment, there are chances that the “integration might itself be the constraint” to slow things and slow down the business.

Therefore, Richard introduces the concept of cloud native integration to connect different systems.

Integration Today

According to Gartner, in current scenario, application-to-application integration is the most critical integration scenario, while few years down the line, cloud service integration will rise to the top. The actual spending on integration platforms is on the rise with the fastest growth in iPaaS and API Management.

Again, Gartner says, by 2020, 75% of the companies will establish a hybrid integration platform using an infrastructure that they assemble from different vendors. By 2021, atleast 50% of large companies will have incorporated citizen integrator capabilities into their integration infrastructure.

What is Cloud Native?

Cloud native is basically “how” do I build a software!

The following image clearly shows the difference between a traditional enterprise and a cloud native enterprise.

Delivering Cloud Native Integration

  • Build a more composable solution that is
    • Loosely coupled
    • Makes use of choreographed services
    • Push more logic to the endpoints
    • Offer targeted updates

Richard then jumped into his demos where in the first demo, he used a Logic App as a data pipeline. The Logic App receives a message from the queue, call a service running in Azure App service, call a Azure function that does some fraud processing, and feed the result message back to the queue for further processing.

To feed the queue, Richard deploys another Logic App where a file is picked up from OneDrive, parse the file as a JSON array and dump it to the queue which is on the other Logic App.

That’s not it! Richard had few more demos in store – Making BizTalk server easy where he used BizTalk 2016 FP1 Management APIs to create BizTalk artifacts self-service style, and automate Azure via Service Broker.

We recommend you to watch this session when the video is made available in a week’s time on the INTEGRATE 2017 website.

Session 3 – Overcoming Challenges When Taking Your Logic App into Production

Stephen started off with a key announcement about the readiness of a New Pluralsight Course – “BizTalk Server Administration with BizTalk360“. The course will be made available shortly.

Phase 1 of the session was targeted towards ‘Decision Making‘, phase 2 was on what we did right and wrong, and the last phase with some important tips.

Decisions

Stephen compared building a .NET parser solution to Logic Apps development. Logic Apps was calculated to have finished earlier and way cheaper. They even questioned if Integration Account are worth the price ($1000 per month)

What’s Wrong and Right?

    • Make design decisions based on the rules on the serverless platform and factoring costs per Logic Apps action
    • Stephen described that initially he used 2 subscriptions in 2 regions, but this made deployment across regions hard. Therefore, the best practice is to have one subscription in one region
    • Solution structure – Solution level maps to a resource group, use one project per Logic App, maintained 3 parameter files, one per environment. For performing deployment you can create a custom VM.
  • Serverless – is AMAZING, but sometimes things break for no fault of your own, sometimes Microsoft support needs to be called in for support/fixing issues

Tips

  • Read the available documentation
  • Don’t be afraid for JSON – code view is still needed especially with new features, but most of the time are soon available in designer and visual studio. Always save or check-in before switching to JSON.
  • Make sure to fully configure your actions, otherwise you cannot save the Logic App
  • Ensure name of action, hard to change afterwards
  • Try to use only one MS account
  • If you get odd deployment results, close / reopen your browser
  • Connections – Live at resource group level. Last deployment wins. Best practices: define all  connection parameters in one Logic App. One connection per destination, per resource group.
  • Default retries – all actions retry 4 additional times over 20s intervals.
  • Control using retry policies
  • Resource Group artefacts – contain subscription id, use parameters instead
  • For each loop – limited to 100000 loops . default to multiple concurrent loops, can be changed to sequential loops
  • Recurrence – singleton
  • User permissions (IAM) – multiple roles exist like the Logic App Contributor, and the Logic App Operator

With that, it was time for the attendees to take a break!

After the break, Duncan Barker from the BizTalk360 team took the stage to thank the wonderful team at BizTalk360 for all their effort in making INTEGRATE 2017 a great success!

Session 4 – BizTalk Server Deep Dive into Feature Pack 1

Tord was given a warm welcome with the song “Rise” by Katy Perry. Tord complimented the welcome by saying how good friends he and Katy Perry are and the story behind how she wrote the song for BizTalk. 🙂

Fun aside, Tord started off the session by saying how BizTalk Server 2016 almost got a pink theme for the icons! :O Just hours before the team was to do the final build for BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 1 release, one of the engineers pointed out the pink stroke on the outside of all icons. The team managed to fix and ship the release.

But, do you know! There is one tiny pixel of pink somewhere in some icon? If you find it, send Tord an email and he will send you a nice gift!

BizTalk Connector in Logic Apps is now Generally Available with Full Support!!!

Microsoft IT team have built a first class project to help migrate easily to BizTalk Server 2016. You can get your downloadable version of the application from the below link. If migration is what is holding you, then make use of this application.

With BizTalk Server, you can do so many things! You can take advantage of the cloud through BizTalk Server. Tord walked through the different features that were released as a part of Feature Pack 1 in detail with some Live Demo.

Session 5 – BizTalk Server Fast & Loud

After that power packed introduction from Daniel Szweda for Sandro Pereira comparing him with Cristiano Ronaldo (who as well hails from Portugal), guess what happened! SANDRO PEREIRA forgot to Turn on his machine to show his presentation :O The IT admin guy at Kings Place almost had to show up 5 – 6 times to get the “problem” solved, and Sandro termed it with the famous word “Jetlag” that was associated with most speakers during any technical issues 😛 🙂 And.. there was a roar when the presentation worked for Sandro! Phew … There goes the BizTalk Wiki Ninja, BizTalk Mapper Man, The Stencil Guy into his session.

Sandro started off his session with this slide

Sandro’s session was more towards BizTalk Server optimization and performance. The points discussed in this session were –

SQL Server

  • Clients still don’t have BizTalk Jobs running
  • Comparing in a Car terminology,
    • BizTalk Server is the Chassis
    • SQL Server is the Engine
    • Hard Drivers is the Tiers
    • Memory is the Battery
    • CPU is the Fuel Injector
    • Network and Visualization Layer is the Exhaust pipe
  • Make sure BizTalk Server and SQL Server Agent jobs are configured and running
  • Treat BizTalk databases as a Black box
  • Size really matters in BizTalk! Large databases impact performance (Eg., MessageBoxDB, Tracking database)
  • Consider to dedicate SQL resources to BizTalk Server
  • Consider splitting the TempDB into multiple data files for better performance

Networking

  • Speed defines everything for this layer
  • At a minimum, you need to have 1 logical disk for data files, 1 for transaction log files, and 1 for TempDB data files
  • Remove unnecessary network
  • Scaling out is not a solution to all problems – sometimes you may also have to scale in to solve a problem!

Session 6 – BizTalk Health Check – What and How?

The last session before lunch was on BizTalk Health Check – What and How? by Saffieldin Ali. BizTalk Health Check is something similar to the MOT Testing that’s performed on vehicles in UK. MOT Testing is a compulsory test for exhaust and emissions of motor vehicles.

In BizTalk, the health check is performed to –

  • Identify symptoms and potential problems before it affects production environment
  • Review critical processes to achieve minimum downtime due to disaster recovery
  • Identify any warnings and red flags that may be affecting users
  • Understanding of common mistakes made by administrators and developers
  • Understand the supportability and best practices

BizTalk Health Check Process

Interviewing

  • Operations Interview (1-1 meetings with admins/dev teams to collect operational view of things)
  • Knowledge Transfer

Collecting

  • Run collection tools (BizTalk Health Monitor etc)
  • Collect informal information (say, I did something wrong last week during an informal discussion)

Analysis and Reporting

  • Run and examine analysis tools results
  • Write and Present final conclusion

BizTalk Health Check Areas

  1. Platform configuration for BizTalk Server
  2. BizTalk Server Configuration
  3. BizTalk Performance
  4. Resilience (High Availability)
  5. SQL Server Configuration for BizTalk Server
  6. Disaster Recovery
  7. Security
  8. BizTalk Application Management and Monitoring

BizTalk Health Check Key Tools

  1. Microsoft Baseline Security Analyser (MBSA)
  2. BizTalk Best Practices Analyser
  3. BizTalk Health Monitor (BHM)
  4. Perf Analysis of Logs (PAL)

Safieldin showed how each of the above products work and how they perform the checks on the BizTalk environment.

It was time for the community to break out for Lunch and some networking before the close of the event in the next couple of hours.

Session 7 – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Hybrid Connectivity by Dan Toomey

The last leg of #Integrate2017 was something quite significant. All the 3 speakers – Daniel Toomey, Wagner Silveira and Martin Abbott are the ones who have flown into London after some long flights. Dan and Martin from Australia (about 20 hours) and Wagner from New Zealand (about 30 hours!).

Post lunch, it was time for Dan Toomey from Australia to take the stage to talk about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Hybrid Connectivity.

Dan started his talk about the types of Azure Virtual Network –

  • Point to Site (P2S) – Something similar to connection when you work from home and connect to corporate network (connect to Citrix/VPN) over the internet
  • Site to Site (S2S) – taking an entire network and joining with another network over the internet
  • ExpressRoute – something like taking a giant cable (managed by someone else) and connecting your corporate network on that.

VNET Integration for Web/Mobile Apps

  • Requires Standard and Premium App Service Plan
  • VNET must be in the same subscription as App Service Plan
  • Must have Point to Site enabled
  • Must have Dynamic Routing Gateway

VNET with API Management

If you have API Management that is sitting in your Virtual Network with access to your Corporate Network gateway, you will get:

  • Added layer of security
  • All benefits of API Management (caching, policies, protocol translation [SOAP to REST], Analytics, etc)

Non-Network based Operations

Azure Relay (an alternate approach) – This is a new offering with Azure Service Bus

    • WCF Relay
    • Hybrid Connections
      • Operates at transport level

On-Premises Data Gateway

  • Generally available since 4th May 2017
  • Acts as a bridge between Azure PaaS and on-prem resources
  • Works with connectors for Azure Logic Apps, Power Apps, Flow and Power BI

Daniel wrapped up his talk by talking about the following business scenarios –

  1. Azure Web/Mobile App to On-Prem
  2. IaaS Server (VM) to On-Prem
  3. SaaS Service to On-Prem
  4. Business to Business
  5. Service Fabric Cluster to On-Prem

To know more about these scenarios that Dan talked about, please watch the video which will be made available soon.

Session 8 – Unlocking Azure Hybrid Integration with BizTalk Server by Wagner Silveira

In this session, Wagner started off his talk speaking about Why BizTalk + Azure, and what BizTalk brings to Hybrid Integration –

  • On-premises adapters
  • Azure adapters
  • Separation of concerns
  • Availability
  • For existing users
    • Leverage investment into the platform
    • Continuity to developers

Wagner talked about the ways in which you can connect to Azure in detail along with some scenarios-

  • Service Bus
  • Azure WCF Relay
  • App Services/API Management
  • Logic Apps

Wagner showed an exciting demo for 2 Line of Business (LoB) systems and finally some tweets coming out of Logic Apps.

Session 9 – From Zero to App in 45 minutes (using PowerApps + Flow) by Martin Abbott

There we were! The last session at #Integrate2017. Obviously not a good feeling being the speaker as you would be closing what was an amazing 3 days of learning and experience. But Martin did a great job in showing the power of PowerApps and Flows and showed how you can build an application in 45 minutes using the combo.

Martin started off his talk talking about Business Application Platform Innovation which is represented in a very nice diagram.

Martin just had 3 slides and it was an action packed session with demo to create an application in under 45 minutes. We recommend you to watch the video which will be available shortly on the event website.

Key Announcement – Global Integration Bootcamp 2018

Martin was one of the organizers of the recently concluded Global Integration Bootcamp event in March 2017. It’s now official that we will have the #GIB event in 2018. The event will happen on 24th March, 2018. You can follow the website http://www.globalintegrationbootcamp.com/ for further updates.

Sentiment Analysis on #Integrate2017

In the Day 1 Recap blog, we had shown some statistics on the sentiment analysis of tweets for hashtag #Integrate2017. Here is one last look at the report at 00:00 (GMT+0530) on June 29, 2017.

And, with that!!! It was curtains down on what has been a fantastic 3 days at INTEGRATE 2017. Well, we are not just done yet! As announced on Day 1 by Saravana Kumar, INTEGRATE 2017 will be back in Redmond, Seattle, USA on October 25-27, 2017. So if you missed attending this event in London, come and join us at Redmond.

We hope you had a great time at INTEGRATE 2017. Until next time, adios!!!

In case you missed it!

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

INTEGRATE 2017 – Recap of Day 2

INTEGRATE 2017 – Recap of Day 2

After an exciting Day 1 at INTEGRATE 2017 with loads of valuable content from the Microsoft Pro Integration team, it was time to get started with Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2017.

Important Links – Recap of Day 1 at INTEGRATE 2017,
Photos from Day 1 at INTEGRATE 2017

Session 1 – Microsoft IT journey with Azure Logic Apps by MSCIT team

Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2017 started off with Duncan Barker of BizTalk360 introducing Mayank Sharma and Divya Swarnkar from the Microsoft IT Team. The key highlights from the session were –

    • Integration Landscape at Microsoft has over 1000 Partners, 170M+ Messages per month, 175+ BizTalk Servers, 200+ Line of Business Systems, 1300+ Transforms and a Multi platform that supports BizTalk Server 2016, Azure Logic Apps, and MABS
    • Microsoft IT Team showed why the team were motivated to move to Logic Apps –
      • Modernization of Integration (Serverless Computing + Managed Services, business agility and accelerated development)
      • Manage and Control Costs based on usage
      • Business Continuity
    • The following image shows where the MSCIT team is placed today in terms of number of releases. Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services will be retired by end of July.
    • Microsoft IT team uses Logic App pipeline to process EDI messages coming from partners
    • For testing purposes, Microsoft IT team uses Azure API Management policies to route the message flows to parallel pipelines for testing purposes
    • The team at Microsoft IT uses Operations Management Suite (OMS) for Logic Apps diagnostics. This was briefly covered earlier by Srinivasa Mahendrakar in one of the Integration Monday sessions – Business Activity tracking and monitoring in Logic Apps. Microsoft IT have migrated all their EDI workloads off of MABS and BizTalk and onto Logic Apps.
    • Microsoft IT only uses BizTalk for its adapters to connect to LOB systems, while all processing happens in Logic Apps.
    • Finally, the team shared their learnings while working with Logic Apps
      • Each Logic App has a published limit – make sure you understand what they are
      • Consider the nature of flow you will create with Logic Apps – high throughput or long running workflows
      • Leverage the platform for concurrency (SplitOn vs. ForEach)
      • Understand the structure and behavior of data (batched vs. non-batched)
      • Consider a SxS strategy to enable test in production
      • In Logic Apps, your delivery options are ‘atleast once’ or ‘at most once’ (not ‘only once’)

Jim Harrer was really appreciative and thankful to the Microsoft IT team for making their trip to London to share their experiences.

Session 2 – Azure Logic Apps – Advanced integration patterns

This was one of the most expected sessions on Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2017 with Jeff Hollan (Sir Hollywood) and Derek Li talking about “Advanced integration patterns”. The agenda of the session included talks on –

  • Logic Apps Architecture
  • Parallel Actions
  • Exception Handling
  • Other “Operation Options”
  • Workflow Expressions

The Logic Apps architecture under the hood looks as follows –

An important point to observe is that the ForEach loop in Logic Apps runs the tasks in parallel!

Awesome overview from @jeffhollan @logicappsio on how #LogicApps are executed by the runtime. No thread management needed!!

The Logic Apps designer is basically a TypeScript/React app that uses OpenAPI (Swagger) to render input and output. The Logic Apps designer has the capability to generate Workflow definition (JSON). You can configure the runAfter options via the Logic Apps designer.

This statistic made by Jeff Hollan was probably the highlight of the show

In the history of #LogicApps, there hasn’t been a single run that hasn’t executed at least once.

After a very interesting demo by Derek Li, Jeff Hollan started his talk on Workflow Expressions. An expression is anything but any input that will be dynamic (changes at every run). Jeff explained the different expression properties in a easy to understand way –

@ – Used to indicate an expression. It can be escaped with @@. Example – @foo()

() – Encapsulate the expression parameters – Example – @foo(‘Hello World’)

{} – “Curly braces means string!!!“. This is same as @string() – Example – @add{(1,1)}

[] – Used to parse properties in the JSON objects – Example – @foo(‘JsonBody’) [‘person’][‘address’]

This session from Jon Fancey and Derek Li was well received by the audience at #Integrate2017.

Jon also made the mention about the feature where customers can test the expressions in the designer which is coming soon!

Session 3 – Enterprise Integration with Logic Apps by Jon Fancey

In this session, Jon Fancey started off his presentation by talking about Batching in Logic Apps and how it works –

  • There are basically two Logic Apps – Sender and Receiver
  • Batcher is aware of the Batching Logic App; whereas Batching Logic App is not aware of the batchers (1:n)

What’s coming in Batching?

  1. Batch Flush
  2. Time based Batch release trigger options
  3. EDI Batching

Jon Fancey moved into the concept of Integration Account (IA) and made the mention about the VETER pipeline being available as a template in Azure Logic Apps using Integration Account.

  • Integration Account is the core to XML and B2B capabilities
  • IA provides partner creation and management
  • IA provides for XML validation, mapping and flatfile conversion
  • Provides tracking

Jon listed the Logic Apps enhancements coming soon for working with XML such as:

  • XML parameters
  • Code and functoids
  • Enhancements soon
    • Transform output format (XML, HTML, Text)
    • BOM handling

Jon showed a very interesting demo about how to transform an XML message with C# and XSLT in Logic Apps. You got to wait a little longer till the videos are made available on the INTEGRATE 2017 event website 🙂

Disaster Recovery with B2B, and how it works?

In the final section of his presentation, Jon discussed about the Monitoring and tracking of Azure Logic Apps. This part was covered by Srinivasa Mahendrakar on one of his recent Integration Monday sessions.

Jon showed an early preview (mockup) of the OMS Dashboard for Azure Logic Apps that’s coming up soon. With this, you can perform Operational Monitoring for Logic Apps in OMS with a powerful query engine. You can expect this feature to be rolled out mid-July!

With that, completed the first set of sessions for the morning on Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2017.

Session 4 – Bringing Logic Apps into DevOps with Visual Studio and monitoring by Jeff Hollan/Kevin Lam

Once again, but unfortunately for the last time on stage, it was time for Sir Hollywood Jeff Hollan to rock the stage with his partner Kevin Lam to talk about bringing Logic Apps into DevOps with Visual Studio and monitoring.

The key highlights from the session include –

Visual Studio tooling to manage Logic Apps

  • Hosted the Logic App Designer within Visual Studio
  • Resource Group Project (same project that manages the ARM projects)
  • Cloud Explorer integration
  • XML/B2B artifacts

Make sure you have selected “Cloud Explorer for Visual Studio 2015 and Azure Logic Apps Tools for Visual Studio” these tools in order to be able to use Logic Apps from Visual Studio. It also works on Visual Studio version 2015/2017.

Kevin and Jeff showed the demo of the Visual Studio tooling with a real time example of using Logic Apps in Visual Studio.

Azure Resource Templates

  • You can create Azure Resource Templates that get shipped on to Azure Resource Manager.
    • Azure Resources can be represented and created via programmatic APIs that are available at http://resources.azure.com. This is a pivot to Azure where you are looking at the API version of your resources.
  • Resource templates define a collection of resources to created
  • Templates include –
    • Resources that you want to create
    • Parameters that you want to pass during deployment (for example)
    • Variables (specific calculated values)
    • Outputs

Service Principal

With this, you can get authorization to an application that you create and then say the application has access to the resources.

Jeff wrapped up the session by showing a demo of how the deployment process works, in detail. You can watch the video that will be available in a week’s time on BizTalk360 website for the detailed understanding of the steps to perform a deployment.

With this wrapped up the 1.5 days of sessions from Microsoft on core integration technologies, and what’s coming up from them in the coming months. It was now time for the Integration MVPs to take the stage and show what they’ve done/achieved, or what they can do with the various offerings from Microsoft.

Session 5 – What’s there & what’s coming in BizTalk360 & ServiceBus360 by Saravana Kumar

Saravana was given a “warm” welcome with a nice music and a loud applause from the audience! 🙂 Saravana thanked the entire Microsoft team for their presence and effort at INTEGRATE 2017 over the last 1.5 days.

Key Highlights from Saravana’s session

BizTalk360 Updates

  • BizTalk Server License Calculator
  • Folder Location Monitoring
    • File, FTP/FTPS, SFTP
  • Queue Monitoring
  • Email Templates
  • Throttling Monitoring
  • On-Premise + Cloud features
    • Azure Logic Apps Management
    • Azure Logic Apps Monitoring
    • Azure Integration Account
    • Azure Service Bus Queues (monitoring)

You can get started with a 14-day FREE TRIAL of BizTalk360 to realize the full blown capabilities of the product.

ServiceBus360

Saravana discussed the challenges with Azure Service Bus and how ServiceBus360 helps to solve the Operations, Monitoring and Analytics issues of Azure Service Bus.

You get ServiceBus360 with a pricing model as low as 15$. We wanted to go with a low cost, high volume model for ServiceBus360. You can also try the product for FREE if you are keen on trying the product. If you are an INTEGRATE 2017 attendee, we have a special offer for you that you cannot afford to miss.

With that it was time for the attendees to break for lunch on Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2017. Lots more in store over the remaining 1.5 days!

Post Lunch Sessions – Session 6 – Give your Bots connectivity, with Azure Logic Apps by Kent Weare

We’ll take you through a quick recap of the post lunch sessions on Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2017.

Kent Weare started off his talk about his company and how they are coping up to the business transformation demands from the government and local bodies in Canada. Kent then shows how their company has grown over the years and how much it will mean to them in terms of cost of business transformation. The approach they have taken is by moving towards “Automating Insight, Artificial Intelligence,  Machine Learning, and BOTS”.

Kent then showed why BOTS are gaining the popularity these days – to Improve Productivity! Bots is something very similar to IMs which users are very familiar with.

Kent then stepped into his demo where the concept was as follows –

Kent wrapped up his session with the following summary for companies to take advantage of the latest technology in store these days.

Session 7 – Empowering the business using Logic Apps by Steef-Jan Wiggers

After Kent Weare, Steef-Jan Wiggers took over the stage to talk about Empowering the business using Logic Apps. This talk from Steef-Jan Wiggers was more from the end user/consumer perspective of using Logic Apps.

Steef took a business case of a company called “Cloud First” that wanted to move to the cloud (and chose Azure). All his talk in this session was focussed towards this company who wanted to migrate to cloud with minimal customization and by having a unified landscape. Steef also showed some sentiment around the developer experience with Logic App.

Steef showed a demo that calculates the sentiment of #Integrate2017 (which is exactly something similar folks at BizTalk360 also have tried and reproduced in the Day 1 Recap blog).

After the end of the demo, Steef talked about the Business Value of Logic Apps –

  • Solving business problem first
  • Fit for purpose for cloud integration’
  • Less cost; Faster time to market

Session 8 – Logic App continuous integration and deployment with Visual Studio Team Services

After Steef, Johan Hedberg took the stage to talk about Logic App continuous integration and deployment with Visual Studio Team Services. Johan set the stage for the session by giving a example –

  • Pete is a web developer who loves the Azure Portal and has an amazing time to market. Generally, he is fast but has no process.
  • Charlotte loves Visual Studio. She wants to bring the Logic App from Visual studio with Source control.
  • Bruce is an operations guy. He does not like Pete and Charlotte having direct access to production. He likes to have a process over anything and would want to approve things before it goes out.

Therefore, what all 3 of them are missing is a common process/pipeline of how to perform things such as –

  • Lack of development standards
  • Process standards
  • Security standards
  • Deployment standards
  • Team communication and culture, and more

Therefore, in this session (and demo), Johan shows how users can use continuous integration and deployment with Visual Studio Team Services using Logic Apps.

Sessions 9 & 10 – Internet of Things

In the last two sessions of Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2017, Sam Vanhoutte and Mikael Hakansson talked about Integration of Things (IoT).

Sam Vanhoutte talked about why integration people are forced to build good IoT solutions. He showed the IoT End-to-End value chain with a nice diagrammatic representation.

Then Sam talked about the different points in the Industrial IoT Connectivity challenge. The points are –

  • Direct connectivity (feels less secure)
  • Cloud gateways (easier to start in a cloud setup)
  • Field gateways (feels more secure)

Sam spoke about Azure IoT Edge, the required hardware for Azure IoT Edge and more about flexible business rules for IoT solutions.

Mikael Hakansson started off his IoT talk from where Sam Vanhoutte left the speech, but there came the fun part of the session. Sandro Pereira had to stop Mikael from delivering his presentation and make him wear the “Green” color shirt for losing a bet (well not sure if Mikael was a part of that bet at all and his friends unanimously agreed he lost the bet 🙂 )in a football match. (so did Steef-Jan Wiggers and he was wearing a green shirt too!)

Mikael started off his talk about IoT === Integration and he introduced the concept of Microsoft Azure IoT Hub in detail.

  • Stand-alone service or as one of the services used in the new Azure IoT Suite
  • With Azure IoT Hub, you can connect your devices to Azure:
    • Millions of simultaneously connected devices
    • Per-device authentication
    • High throughput data ingestion
    • Variety of communication patterns
    • Reliable command and control

Mikael gave a very cool demo on IoT with Azure Functions in his usual, calm way of coding while on stage. We recommend you to watch the video to see the effort that has gone behind to prepare for the demo and actually be able to code while presenting the session.

End of the Sessions

At the end of the session, it was curtains down on what promised to be another spectacular day of sessions at INTEGRATE 2017. The team gathered for a lovely photo shoot courtesy photographer Tariq Sheikh.

With that we would like to wrap our exhaustive coverage of Day 2 proceedings at INTEGRATE 2017. Stay tuned for the updates from Day 3. Until then Good night from London!

ICYMI: Recap of Day 1 at INTEGRATE 2017

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

INTEGRATE 2017 – Recap of Day 1 & Announcements from the Microsoft Pro Integration Team

INTEGRATE 2017 – Recap of Day 1 & Announcements from the Microsoft Pro Integration Team

After months of preparations and work behind the scenes, it’s time for INTEGRATE 2017 – the premier integration focused conference at Kings Place, London. A beautiful day greeted the attendees, speakers from the Microsoft Pro Integration team from Redmond, and Speakers (Integration MVPs) for the event.

Registrations

Registrations started off at 0730 hrs. To avoid the hassle of making the attendees wait for long, we had four separate booths to ease the registration process. Indeed this idea worked out quite well and we were perfectly set up for a 0845 start. The statistics after registrations on Day 1 stand as follows –

Welcome Speech at INTEGRATE 2017

At 0845, Saravana Kumar – Founder/CTO of BizTalk360 officially started the INTEGRATE 2017 event with his welcome speech.

He thanked the sponsors, attendees, Jim Harrer for bringing the vast experience from Redmond to this event, and the rest of the speakers of this event. Saravana also appreciated Kent Weare for taking interest in consistently delivering the Middleware Friday sessions (for 6 months now) and the team consistently working hard for Integration User Group (who recently completed their 100th episode).

INTEGRATE 2017 USA Redmond – October 25 – 27, 2017

The key announcement during the welcome speech was that INTEGRATE 2017 event will happen at Redmond, Seattle on October 25 – 27, 2017. Registrations will open by July 1st for this event. Stay tuned!

It was then time for Duncan Barker, Business Development Manager at BizTalk360 to give a sneak peak into the history of BizTalk360 and ServiceBus360 and to welcome the Keynote speaker – Jim Harrer.

Keynote Speech

It was time for Jim Harrer – Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft Pro Integration team to get started with his talk on how Microsoft brings intelligence to its Hybrid Integration Platform. Jim started off his talk saying –

Microsoft is not a Cloud only company. We strongly believe and invest a lot in Hybrid.

How the team have evolved since INTEGRATE 2016?

That’s one reason why Microsoft reinvested into BizTalk server and also took steps to make sure BizTalk server becomes stronger with cloud based offerings (such as Azure Logic Apps). BizTalk server and Logic Apps together form the core heartbeat of a hybrid integration solution. In addition, after INTEGRATE 2016, the Pro Integration team added the API Management team into the hierarchy, brought the Host Integration Server Product into the Pro Integration team.

Jim showed the Pro Integration team’s year in review showing how they have progressed as a team in the 4 main departments – Logic Apps, BizTalk, Host Integration Server, and API Management.

Jim felt proud to announce that Microsoft has the largest number of datacenters around the globe than anyone else, and Logic Apps are available in over half of these available data centers. The team is working hard to deploy the solutions across more data centers in the months to come.

Jim was happy to introduce all his thought leaders who have taken time and come from Redmond to this event. Jim thanked the team for making the flight across the pond for INTEGRATE 2017.

The first step for the team was to start working on connecting the different Azure Services such as Logic Apps, Azure Functions, API Management, Cognitive Services, and so on to unlock the value and take advantage of the value that Azure provides. After Azure Services, the team decided to interconnect the different Line of Business (LoB) applications so that connection could be established with the on-premise systems. Jeff had a huge round of congratulations for his team for making these integrations in a year’s time and get them Generally Available (GA) for the public.

Summary points from the Keynote Speech at INTEGRATE 2017

    • Jim announced that by Friday (June 30th), Logic Apps will be made available in both the UK regions.
    • Logic Apps currently has over 160+ connectors
    • After Azure Services and Line of Business Applications, the team at Microsoft started looking at how to get the maximum intelligence and insights. That’s when they expanded their horizon of “Better Together” with more offerings related to intelligence and insights (Cognitive Services, Sentiment Analysis, LUIS, Face API, Insights, Translator, Power BI and more). Initially, Better Together was applicable to Logic Apps and BizTalk Server, but today, it’s more vast.
  • Microsoft has aimed at improving the rate at which it takes to integrate solutions at the Speed of Business. This has been the key focus of the team over the last year.
  • The Pro Integration team is the most sought after team by most companies that come to Redmond to integrate their business solutions. The team has been focused to improve the business value of customers who are using Microsoft’s Integration solutions.

Keynote – Demo (#ContosoFitness)

To get the audience understand the pulse of what Microsoft’s Integration solutions can offer, a real time demo was planned with a physical fitness company called #ContosoFitness. The idea was to show how they made use of the existing technologies in the Microsoft Integration space and develop solutions for common problems. Jim hinted that most demos over the course of INTEGRATE 2017 will be focused on #ContosoFitness example.

The demo had some very interesting answers to common problems faced by enterprises. The demos were presented by Jeff Hollan (Logic Apps and Cognitive Services), Jon Fancey (Logic Apps), Tord Glad Nordahl (BizTalk) If you are keen to know about it, please wait for the videos to be released in few week’s time. 🙂 I’ll leave it there for the moment.

Jim wrapped up the keynote by telling the users how they can maximize application value –

  • By looking for opportunities to improve customer experience (With Cognitive services etc)
  • Find ways to make it easier for prospects to turn into customers. Identify customer pain points and work on solutions to fix the problem.
  • Seek integration opportunities that yield competitive advantage
  • Use Insights to gain business efficiency

That wrapped up a very interesting first hour at INTEGRATE 2017 and set the tone perfectly for the rest of the sessions lined up for the day.

Session 2 – Innovating BizTalk Server to bring more capabilities to the Enterprise customer

Tord Glad Nordahl took over from Jim Harrer to talk about Microsoft’s commitment to BizTalk Server. With BizTalk Server, customers can –

  • Connect on-premises hybrid and cloud applications
  • Run mission-critical, complex integration scenarios with ease
  • Enhance business productivity by automating business processes

Tord showed a nice chart showing the Mainstream support lifecycle for different versions of BizTalk Server. He even hinted on few customers still running versions as low as BizTalk 2004 😉

Then Tord showed what Microsoft did with BizTalk Server 2016 (being their 10th release in the series).

  • Microsoft created the Logic App Adapter to help users to connect with Logic Apps
  • High Availability through SQL Server AlwaysOn availability groups
  • SHA2 support certified by Drummond (last year)
  • Ordered delivery for Dynamic Ports
  • Improvements for Adapters (SAP, FTP, File, etc)
  • Then the major FEATURE PACK 1 Release few months earlier

Tord as well showed the release cadence of Microsoft to answer the question “Is BizTalk Server Dead?” correctly.

With that, Tord wrapped up his session and it was time to take a break for the attendees on Day 1 of INTEGRATE 2017.

Session 3 – Messaging yesterday, today, and tomorrow by Dan Rosanova

Dan started off his session by wowing the audience on the Azure Messaging numbers. Those numbers are simply awesome!

Similar to Azure Messaging, Event Hubs also has some staggering statistics (YoY comparison) –

Dan made the mention that customers can make use of ServiceBus360 to monitor their Azure Service Bus resources and keep a watch on the failure rate. In the above screenshot, Dan says the team receives easily about 28 million failures per week and ServiceBus360 can help customers to keep track of these failures and fix them at the earliest.

Dan then gave a brief history about Messaging, how it was, and how the landscape is today. Today’s messaging landscape involves –

Microsoft is clearly the leader in the messaging space. Dan spoke about the concepts of Event Hubs, Messaging as a Service (MaaS) – Queues and Topics, features of Service Bus, Relays.

What’s in store with Service Bus team?

  • Encryption at rest (Event Hubs and Premium Service Bus)
  • Managed Secure Identity
  • Bring your Own Key (BYOK) encryption at rest for premium products
  • IP Filtering
  • Vnet
  • New metrics pipeline
  • GeoDR – coming to Event Hubs, Service Bus and Relays this summer 
    • You can create an alias – FQDN like namespace
    • Select Primary region and NS name
    • Select Secondary region and NS name
    • GeoDR team will copy data between regions
    • You call REST call to initiate failover
      • GeoDR team ejects old primary and break metadata sync
      • Alias connection string continues to work for send and receive

Session 4 – Azure Event Hubs: the world’s most widely used telemetry service by Shubha Vijayasarathi

Shubha started off her talk talking about the 3 main S’s the Product Group is focusing on to build their solutions that are –

  1. Simple
  2. Stable
  3. Scalable

Event Hubs Archive CAPTURE

Shubha then deep dived into the concept of Event Hubs. Shubha made the mention that majority of Event Hubs customers are writing their stream to a persistent store mainly for long term storage and batch processing of the information. For achieving this, the Event Hubs team are reintroducing the concept of Archive, but with a better name called CAPTURE.

Event Hubs CAPTURE allows you to batch and real time processing on the same stream. This feature will be GA on June 28, 2017 across all Azure regions.

Shubha then covered the conceptual architecture of Event Hubs and gave a clear distinction between Event Hubs and Service Bus Topics.

Event Hubs Auto-Inflate

Shubha then gave an insight into one of the recently released features earlier this month called Event Hubs – Auto Inflate. For more information about this feature, we recommend you to watch this Middleware Friday episode by Kent Weare.

Shubha wrapped up her session talking about the Event Hubs pricing, dedicated Event Hubs and one of the soon to be released feature called Event Hubs Clusters.

Event Hubs Clusters

You can stand up your own Event Hubs Clusters in less than two hours. You can monitor your cluster health, and with this model you have the option to start small and then scale as you go. This feature is currently in Private Preview and will soon be available in the Public Preview (by September).

What’s Coming – Azure Event Hubs

  • GeoDR Capability
  • Encryption at Rest
  • Metrics in the new portal
  • ADLS for public preview
  • Dedicated EH clusters for private preview
  • Namespace updates
    • Sun setting the old Azure Portal
    • All services are independent (Messaging, Event Hubs, Relays)
    • Different portal experience

With that, it was the end of the first half of Day 1 sessions on INTEGRATE 2017.

During lunch, we took a statistic on the sentiment of Tweets for the hashtag #Integrate20107 and here’s the report. This report was generated by using a Logic App that connects with the Sentiment Analysis connector to identify the sentiment of tweets with hashtag #Integrate2017, and later the results are categorized based on the value on a scale of 0 to 1 and the data is loaded into a Power BI dashboard.

Note: This report started collecting data from Saturday when the buzz started for #Integrate2017.

Post Lunch Sessions – Azure Logic Apps and Azure Functions

Post lunch, it was time for the dynamic crew of the Logic Apps Live webcast to take over the stage – Jeff Hollan and Kevin Lam. Kevin started off the session taking the audience on a getting started session with Azure Logic Apps.

“Logic Apps means Powerful Integration” – Kevin Lam

What is Logic Apps?

Logic Apps is Microsoft’s strategy for Serverless technologies.

  • Faster integration using interactive visual designer
  • Easy workflow connector with triggers and actions
  • Built for mission critical integration
  • Create, Deploy, Manage and Monitor

What’s coming in Logic Apps?

  • Azure Storage Tables – in addition to Queues and Blobs
  • Oracle eBusiness Suite
  • ServiceNow
  • SOAP Connector (Yaaaayyyy!!!!!)
  • Service Principles
  • Custom Connectors – Build and deploy your own connector!!

Logic Apps is now CERTIFIED!!

Logic Apps is certified by –

  • Drummond AS2
  • ISO 27001
  • SOC (I, II, III)
  • HIPAA
  • PCI DSS

Logic Apps is Agile! What’s Coming?

Jeff & Kevin gave a very interesting demo based on the #ContosoFitness idea that was earlier discussed during the keynote.

Azure Functions

Jeff continued the session from Logic Apps to Azure Functions. He started off with the evolution of application platforms –

Serverless is the future

  • Abstraction of servers
  • Event Driven and instant scale
  • Micro-billing

Azure Functions is nothing but some code + event/data

Points to Remember with Azure Functions

  • If you are using Visual Studio 2017 (Preview mode currently), you can download Azure Functions Tools for Visual Studio

Session 8 – Microsoft Flows

Derek Li from Microsoft Flows team started off his session talking about what is Microsoft Flows. Flows helps non developers automate their workflow across different apps and services without having to write single line of code.

Microsoft Flow solves the last mile of integration challenges.

Why Flows and not Logic Apps?

Why Flow is important for integration teams?

  • Flow lets business users to self-service and solve simple problems on their own
  • Helps customers to be more engaged
  • Popular, advanced versions of flows translate into Logic Apps
  • For Flow to connect to your services, custom connector has to be developed

Session 9 – Azure API Management

Vladimir Vinogradsky and Matthew Farmer started their session on Azure API Management. I will take you through the key highlights from this session –

  • The following are the updates that have gone into API Management after last year INTEGRATE event 
  • Versioning approach
    • Versioning is opt-in
    • Choose appropriate scheme for API
    • Create New API versions as first class objects
    • Make developers aware of versions and revisions 

Matt Farmer then showcased the API New Portal and he recommends everyone to take a look at the new portal. Paul gave an interesting demo walkthrough about the new portal along with the #ContosFitness concept that was discussed throughout the day.

Finally Vlad came back on stage to discuss the roadmap for the API Management team.

Towards the end of the day, Paul Larsen and Steve Melan showed how you can integrate heritage IBM systems using new cloud and on-premises connectors with an interesting demo.

With that it was a wrap on Day 1 at INTEGRATE 2017. It was time for the attendees to chill out over some drinks and networking.

Statistics of Tweets with #Integrate2017 – End of Day 1

The following screenshot shows the report of number of tweets and their sentiment at the end of Day 1 of #Integrate2017.

And that’s a wrap on our summary of Day 1 at INTEGRATE 2017. We already look forward for Day 2 and Day 3 sessions. Thanks for reading! Good night from Day 1 at INTEGRATE 2017, London.

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

Celebrating 100th Integration Monday Episode – Live Q&A session with Microsoft Product Group

Celebrating 100th Integration Monday Episode – Live Q&A session with Microsoft Product Group

Background

It all started back in 2006 when Michael Stephenson and Saravana Kumar identified that people in the integration space lack the technical know-how of concepts. In an effort to bridge this gap, they decided to create a strong community where people can share their experience and learning with others. This saw the birth of BizTalk User Group. Later, when the integration scope expanded beyond BizTalk to WCF, AppFabric, BizTalk Services, the community was renamed as UK Connected Systems User Group (UKCSUG). In 2015, as the integration scope grew wider, the community user group was renamed as Integration User Group. You can read the detailed history behind organizing Integration Monday’s in our Integration User Group launch blog.

The 100th Episode- A Milestone enroute!!

Since the launch of Integration Monday on January 19, 2015, it has taken us close to 29 months to hit the milestone 100th Integration Monday episode mark. We have strived our best to consistently deliver one session every Monday (except public and bank holidays).  There is a separate team working to ensure the sessions are slotted out in advance for a quarter, getting in touch with potential speakers and scheduling them, having test sessions before the webinar, getting the registrations, social media promotions, uploading the videos and presentations after the event, and so on.

Statistics

A look at some of the statistics from the Integration Monday sessions.

integration user group

We wanted to make the 100th Integration Monday episode a grand one. After a lot of email conversations and brainstorming, we narrowed down on the option of having a 1 hour Q&A session with the Microsoft Product Group. Then we realized that the 100th Integration Monday episode falls exactly one week before INTEGRATE 2017. So it would only make sense to make the 100th Integration Monday episode to be a prelude to the biggest integration focussed conference starting on June 26th.

Join the community and get to share your knowledge with developers and architects to learn about the evolving integration technologies. Register for our future events.

Preparations for the Special Episode on Integration Monday

Few back and forth emails with the Microsoft Product Group (thanks to Saravana), we were all set for the 100th Integration Monday episode. We learnt that we will have the Pro Integration team presence across the different product offerings from Microsoft such as BizTalk, Azure Logic Apps, Azure API Management, Azure Service Bus.

integration user group

Jim Harrer – ‎Pro Integration Group PM, Jon Fancey – ‎Principal Program Manager (Azure Logic Apps & BizTalk), Tord Glad Nordahl – Program Manager (owning BizTalk Server), Dan Rosanova – ‎Principal Program Manager (Product Owner for Azure Messaging), Jeff Hollan – ‎Senior Program Manager at Microsoft (Azure), Kevin Lam – Principal Program Manager for Microsoft Azure Scheduler, Logic Apps, Azure Resource Manager and other services, Vladimir Vinogradsky – Principal PM Manager (Azure API Management).

Since it was only a one hour Q&A session, we decided to collect the questions upfront from the registrants. So, the team quickly set course to design an event landing page with all the session details and a simple form for users to submit their questions for the Pro Integration team.

Registrations

We received close to 200 registrations for the event and some very interesting questions from the attendees. We categorized the questions based on the product offering and shared it in advance with the Pro Integration team so that they can plan out their responses in the best interest of time.

Recap from the 100th Integration Monday Episode

The stage was perfectly set for the 100th Integration Monday episode. As attendees started to join in, Saravana Kumar started off the broadcast at 0735 BST welcoming the Pro Integration team and the attendees on the webinar. After a round of quick self introductions, it was time to get into the questions from the attendees. I’ll try to highlight some of the key discussions that happened on the webinar in this blog post.

integration user group

Question: What does Microsoft see as the future of Integration and what it means to Microsoft?

Jim Harrer: The past year (since the major announcements at INTEGRATE 2016) has been extremely busy for Microsoft in terms of bringing the team together and respond better to customer requirements, cater to the demands of our partner ecosystem and define the strategy around application integration and enterprise integration. Microsoft has achieved this by building the Hybrid Integration platform. Microsoft has been talking and dealing with “Better Together” strategy when it comes to cloud and on-premise offering. Therefore, the entire team (under the Program Managers on the webinar) has been focussing on the Integration strategy.

The team has really stuck to be Hybrid Integration platform and delivered some awesome stuff around it — Feature Pack 1 for BizTalk Server, Logic Apps and BizTalk Connector to connect the on-premise and cloud solutions, first class experience with Azure Service Bus and API Management. The focus for the future is to extend these offerings into other Azure services in order to have a Better Together strategy across all product offerings. In the last year, the key highlights were the GA of BizTalk 2016 and the Feature Pack 1 (totally a new concept from Microsoft) that received a lot of positive feedback from the community.

For more “exciting” information on the future of Microsoft and what’s lined up, you may have to wait one more week for INTEGRATE 2017 where the Pro Integration team will be releasing their vision, strategy and roadmap for the upcoming year. So stay tuned for our further blog posts from INTEGRATE 2017 🙂

Question: What kind of solutions are customers using Microsoft’s offerings? In other words, what kinds of features are customers leveraging Microsoft technologies for?

Tord Glad Nordahl: Customers are moving into the Digital Transformation world. Say, for eg., BizTalk server being used in scenarios where we would have never thought of in the past after release of Feature Pack 1. Customers have been able to define their workflows and build their own integration solution. BizTalk customers have started taking advantage of (for eg.,) Powerapp to manage their BizTalk server environment, connect BizTalk to SignalR, etc., and make their integration solution more interesting, smart and predictive.

Jim Harrer: “Integration is HOT. We are enjoying the hotness of this concept”. All Microsoft’s products are seeing the growth and the customer numbers are on the rise. Customers no longer can have siloed applications; instead they need to extend them out and maximize the value by integrating with different other systems. Vlad’s team (API Management team) have enjoyed the success where legacy systems are now starting to put their API into the API Management platform.

Vladimir Vinogradsky – Previously, customers were exposing APIs for mobile apps, partner integrations (closed connection). The way customers expose their APIs is now changing. These days, companies use API Management to manage both their external and internal APIs across the organization.

Dan Rosanova – Enterprise integration has got the right meaning over the last few months or so. Earlier it was within a team, department or business. Previously, for instance, someone may have only used Service Bus and some compute to perform all their integration. Nowadays, you need not write any code to use all the functionalities in Service Bus as Logic Apps gives you the complete control by means of its connectors.

Jon Fancey – Customers visit the Microsoft platform from different locations for different reasons. The general feedback is that they value the fact that they can get started from one place and then expand using Microsoft’s Integration Portfolio (rich services that are available on-premises and on Azure).

Question: How is being “Serverless” helping Microsoft?

Jeff Hollan: Serverless is the next step of evolution with Platform as a Service (PaaS). It does not mean there are no servers! There are servers, but, as an operator/developer, you need not worry about the servers. No worries about the server being secure, scalable etc!!

In Azure, there are few core offerings that are serverless – Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps. The unique advantage in the serverless story when it comes to Azure is that integration and serverless are treated as “hand in glove”. With Serverless, customers feel they can get something into production really quick and connect it to the system/API that I am concerned about. This helps the project IT to move faster to get into the speed of business.

Question: How is Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 1 being received by the customers? What’s the plan moving forward?

Tord Glad Nordahl: It was a complete team restructure that we had to go through during the release of Feature Pack 1 and the release process (from once in every 2 years for a major release). Feature Pack 1 was mainly intended to help customers do the better integration. Most suggestions for the features for Service Pack 1 actually came from customers through the Uservoice (Customer Feedback) portal. With Feature Pack releases, customers can do more with the services provided by Microsoft and improve on what they already have in store.

The plan is to continue the investment and working on the features that were shipped as a part of Feature Pack 1. For what’s coming more in upcoming Feature Packs, stay tuned for INTEGRATE 2017 announcements in a week’s time 🙂

Question: We see updates for new ServiceBus Library for a .Net Client to use Azure AD Authentication. What will happen to the existing Library that uses Connection String from Shared Access Policy. Will that continue to be in use with new updates added to them?

Dan Rosanova: Yes, both the libraries will continue to use SAS as it is very useful for high messaging scenarios. For the new library, the team is working on implementing Active Directory MSI (Secure Managed Identities for Services).

Question: I have a multi-cloud environment. Are there any Logic App AWS connectors that are in the pipeline?

Jeff Hollan: At present, there are no out-of-the-box connectors in the library (of the available 160+ connectors). If you would like to request for this connector, you can go to the Logic Apps Connectors Uservoice page and search if the request for the connector is already available. If yes, vote for the request so that the team knows which connector to work on priority. If not, you can create the request for the connector and the team will assess the demand based on the votes.

Request from the Pro Integration team – If you require any new connector or a feature in any of the products, the best place to request/show your support is through the Uservoice page for the particular product.

Question: Should I hollow out my EDI exchange running on BizTalk Server 2010 and move into Azure Logic Apps, or should I upgrade to BizTalk 2016?

Tord Glad Nordahl: This completely depends on where you are doing the workflow/integration. If it’s all on the cloud and you are communicating with your partners on the cloud, then Logic Apps is the best way to go forward. However, if you are doing a lot of stuff on-premise, then BizTalk is also the right choice. If there is a hybrid scenario where you do processing both on-premise and the cloud, then you can use both in conjunction. Therefore, it all depends on the need of the customer. So Microsoft’s responsibility is to provide features and products that customers ask for!

Question: When will we see a true PaaS implementation of API Management, with a corresponding price model?

Vladimir Vinogradsky:  There are thoughts behind getting a PaaS implementation of API Management, but no concrete timelines on the availability of this functionality.

Question: My question is around using SQL Availability groups in BizTalk setup. Currently with BizTalk Server 2016 and SQL Server 2016, it needs atleast 8 SQL instances to run BizTalk HA environment with SQL availability groups. With the announcement that SQL Server 2017 supports distributed transactions for databases in availability groups, does it mean that the minimum number of instances required will reduce from 8 to 2?

Tord Glad Nordahl: Definitely, yes! This will be addressed. The BizTalk team is working hard with the SQL team to get this addressed.

Question: Now that BizTalk Services is dead we are certain that the two tools that will be kept are BizTalk (On-Prem) and Logic Apps (cloud)?

Jon Fancey: A common question received by the Logic Apps team was “When should I use BizTalk Services and when should I use Logic Apps?” Since its absolutely ridiculous to have the same offering in multiple features, the team worked hard over the last 18 months to make sure all features that are a part of the BizTalk Services are shifted to Logic Apps. This has ZERO IMPACT on BizTalk Server. Although the name has the word “BizTalk Server”, it does not mean the end of the road for BizTalk Server. It’s just a shift to the capabilities and what the team is focusing on – BizTalk Server, Logic Apps, and Enterprise Integration.

Question: What’s the Future of Service Bus On-Premises?

Dan Rosanova: This was announced in January. The future is very well defined that it goes out of mainline support in January 2018. There are no plans to replace it. The On-premise roadmap involves Azure stack for better alignment with other services.

Question: Is Logic Apps a mature technology or not considering that it’s pretty much a new concept?

Jeff Hollan: Reading through the customer stories where customers talk about how they have been using Logic Apps in their environments and the different scenarios that they have implemented, it’s only unfair to comment on the maturity of the product as a whole. Logic Apps is just about 12 months since it went GA and seeing the number of customer success stories and numerous blog posts on how the community have been using Logic Apps makes us feel that we are in the right direction. Therefore, if there is any chance that Logic Apps ended up not having a great SLA, it’s not only for Logic Apps but around 10-12 other connected services/products in Microsoft’s offering feeling the ripple effect.

Logic Apps has been built very consciously by taking the learnings from BizTalk server and used the learning to build a very strong cloud platform for our customers.

With that, it was almost close to one hour since we started the session! Time just flew in the blink of an eye, but boy! what an engrossing discussion that was from the team. You can watch the video of the session here –

Final Question: What’s the roadmap for Healthcare companies to move to the cloud?

Jim Harrer: The Pro Integration team is already working on improving the vertical strategy given that a real good functionality exists around the product. The team is challenged to put together different solutions for different verticals, healthcare being one of them.

Jon Fancey: Microsoft is keen to developing and building a solid stable platform to provide a lot of general purpose integration capabilities across the board so that people can build mission critical integration solutions.

If you have any specific questions related to any vertical, get a chance to meet the same team next week at London at INTEGRATE 2017.

Feedback from the Community

Here’s what the community had to say about the Integration User Group initiative and on reaching the 100th episode –

Integration User Group Evangelises Microsoft Integration developments

Dedicated people, talking about things they love; The sessions stimulate me to try new things

Big kudos to BizTalk360 team for doing an amazing job in evangelizing Microsoft Enterprise Integration.

Feedback like this drive us to move forward and deliver the best content to our attendees. If you have not registered for our event updates, we recommend you to register for the upcoming events on the Integration User Group website.

Final wrap up of the session

Jim Harrer thanked the attendees who joined the webcast, congratulated the team behind Integration User Group for reaching their 100th milestone episode and the speakers who presented sessions on Integration User Group.

You can watch the previous episodes of Integration Monday on the Past Events section, and register for the upcoming events.

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

We’re just days away from INTEGRATE 2017!

We’re just days away from INTEGRATE 2017!

It’s time for you to pack your bags and prepare for your trip to London for INTEGRATE 2017 — the biggest Integration focused conference of the year. We are almost there! (just a week away before the event). We decided to write this blog with some last minute information to make it easy for you to attend the event. If you still haven’t booked your tickets, we have the last 10 tickets up for grabs on a first come first serve basis. Don’t miss out the chance to be at INTEGRATE 2017!

Attendee Count

We are expecting close to 380+ attendees this year for INTEGRATE 2017. It’s quite amazing to see the response year after year for this event and the amount of hope the folks in the Microsoft Integration Community have on BizTalk360 to consistently and successfully organize this event. We will be able to present you the exact stats on the first day of the event.

Event Venue

Kings Place Events
90 York Way, London, N1 9AG.

The venue is located in the heart of London. Just a five minute walk from Kings Cross and St. Pancras International Stations. If you are travelling from:

  • London Heathrow Airport – Kings Place is approximately 50 mins by train
  • London Gatwick Airport – Kings Place is approximately an hour by train and underground
  • London City Airport – Approximately 45 minutes by underground and DLR

There are high-speed services from Kent, majority of all trains from the North arrive at either Kings Cross or Euston (which is only 10 mins walk), and most underground lines stop at Kings Cross. St Pancras is also the home of Eurostar.

Quick Link: Tube Map to reach Kings Place

Event Registration

The registration desk will be open from 0730 hrs on Day 1. To ease the registration process, there will be 4 booths and will be categorized alphabetically (as per your first name) for you to register on the 1st day. You will be provided your conference ID badges. Please remember to wear your badge at all times.

The easiest way to make your way through the event venue is to follow the signage or simply reach out to one of our volunteers for any assistance.

Day 1 – It’s all Microsoft, Microsoft, and Microsoft sessions….

You simply cannot miss Day 1 of INTEGRATE 2017! We have lined up 9 sessions from the Microsoft Product Group team starting off with the keynote speech by Jim Harrer on what’s happened in the Hybrid Integration Platform over the past year and how AI is changing the way Microsoft thinks about enterprise application integration. The subject matter of interest then slowly shifts to BizTalk, Enterprise Messaging, and finally into the vast ocean of Azure related topics like Event Hubs, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Microsoft Flows, and API Management. And probably, this is the best day you can get your questions answered from the Microsoft Product Group or the community team present at the event. As Saravana Kumar, founder/CTO of BizTalk360 says,

If you cannot find an answer to your question in this room (INTEGRATE event), you probably will not be able to find an answer elsewhere.

Evening Drinks with Networking

We have arranged for evening networking after the end of Day 1 over some drinks. Enjoy your drink after an informative Day 1 at INTEGRATE 2017 and get a chance to meet fellow integration MVPs, the Product Group and people from the Microsoft Integration space.

The first half of Day 2 (till 1145 AM) is also covered with sessions from the Microsoft Product Group, after which the remaining 1.5 days belong to the Integration MVPs.

Quick Link: INTEGRATE 2017 Agenda

Meet our Sponsors

INTEGRATE 2017 would not be the same without our sponsors and we would like to extend our thanks to our Titanium Sponsor Microsoft, Platinum Sponsor Codit, Gold Sponsors – Bouvet, Reply Solidsoft, Active Adapter, and our Silver sponsors – QuickLearn Training, Middleway, Affinus. You can walk through the sponsor booths on the mezzanine floor during coffee/lunch breaks and engage in a conversation.

BizTalk360 & ServiceBus360 Booths – Meet the team!

That’s not all! The core team from BizTalk360 & ServiceBus360 – the think tank team, Development folks, QA people, customer support team, client relationship group (who keep our customers happy!) are all available over the 3 days of event. Come over to the BizTalk360 and ServiceBus360 booths at the event venue to meet the team who work behind the scenes on these products.

Informal Entertainment on Day 1 Evening

We have some informal entertainment planned for Day 1 evening during the drinks/networking session.

Social Media – Post, Follow, Like, Comment, Share about the event

Let it just not be a one-sided action at INTEGRATE! Come and join us on social media and spread the word about the event to the world. Show us how you are enjoying INTEGRATE by sharing photographs from the event venue.

Official Event Hashtag – #Integrate2017

If you are not attending the event, don’t worry! Simply follow us on –

Twitterhttps://twitter.com/BizTalk360
Facebookhttps://facebook.com/BizTalk360
Instagramhttps://instagram.com/BizTalk360

Packing your stuff for travel

We care about our attendees who are travelling into London for INTEGRATE. We have people travelling all the way from New Zealand flying approximately over 30 hours, and folks from the US crossing the pond.

Temperatures are slightly on the warmer side during this time, but can become overcast with spells of rain. So make sure you pack the right set of clothes. The average daytime temperatures are around 23°C/73.4F.

The dress code for INTEGRATE 2017 is standard Business Casuals.

Wishing you a Safe Travel! See you at INTEGRATE 2017

On behalf of the INTEGRATE 2017 Event Management Team, I would like to wish you a safe travel — if you are travelling by plane, train, bus, or any other mode. We look forward to seeing you at INTEGRATE 2017 event on June 26th at Kings Place. For any more details about INTEGRATE 2017, you can visit the event website.

See you in the next few days! 🙂

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

Azure Logic Apps – Retry Policy (Middleware Friday)

Azure Logic Apps – Retry Policy (Middleware Friday)

This blog will give you a recap of the feature content that was discussed as a part of Episode 22 of Middleware Friday. In this episode, Kent Weare discussed a small, yet very interesting feature in Azure Logic Apps – the Retry Policy.

Logic App Retry Policy

To understand the Retry Policy better, let’s assume we have an endpoint that is consumed by Logic Apps. If the endpoint has some intermittent issues, and the initial request fails to execute, the number of retries will be attempted based on the “retry count” default settings. By default, the retry action will execute 4 additional times over 20-second intervals. The retry policy applies to intermittent failure HTTP codes like 408, 429, 5xx series. You can define the retry policy as follows:

"retryPolicy" : {
     "type": "<type-of-retry-policy>",
     "interval": <retry-interval>,
     "count": <number-of-retry-attempts>
}

The maximum number of retry attempts that can be made is 4. If you try tweaking the retry count in the JSON, during the Logic App execution you will notice an exception as “The provided retry count of ‘value’ is not valid. The retry count must be a positive number no greater than ‘4’“. Similarly, the maximum delay for a retry can be set to 1 hour while the minimum delay is 5 seconds. Azure Logic Apps uses ISO 8601 standards for the above mentioned time durations and you need to define the interval in one of the following formats –

PnYnMnDTnHnMnS
PnW
P<date>T<time>

Demo – With Default Retry Mechanism

Kent demonstrated the Azure Logic App Retry Policy with the help of the following Logic App example –

Prerequisite: Create a Logic App before proceeding with the steps shown below

  1. First, let’s start with a Blank Logic App. In the Logic App designer, we will get started with creating a simple HTTP request trigger.
  2. Next, we will create an HTTP POST method and give a fake URL (URI) to allow the retry mechanism to kick in
  3. Finally, an HTTP response action with the status code of 200 to complete the Logic App

When we execute the Logic App, you will notice that the default retry mechanism (4 attempts, once every 20 seconds) will kick in.

After about 70 seconds, the fourth retry is performed.

Finally, after 80 seconds, the Logic App execution will fail and the corresponding error will be displayed in the Logic App Designer.

You can alter the retry mechanism by entering the code view and modifying the code with the values as shown previously in the blog post.

Therefore, the demo clearly shows how the retry policy works out of the box in Logic Apps and how you can customize the retry policy within its limits. You can watch the video of this session here –

Feedback Survey

If you have any specific topics of interest at Middleware Friday, you can fill in this survey. Alternatively, you can tweet at @MiddlewareFri or drop an email to middlewarefriday@gmail.com with your topics of preference.

You can watch the Middleware Friday sessions here.

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – May 2017

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – May 2017

The Azure Logic Apps team have been consistently delivering the monthly update webinars to showcase the improvements in the Azure portal. A huge shout out to the team for maintaining this consistency and at the same time delivering the improvements to the portal. The portal is definitely looking mature and with more features to come in, it’s pretty sure good times are ahead! The webcast for the month of April was held on May 2, 2017. This month’s webcast was spearheaded by Jeff Hollan, Kevin Lam and Jon Fancey from the Azure Logic Apps team. The updates from this edition of Logic Apps live are as follows .

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

  1. Visual Studio 2017 tools – Visual Studio 2017 now supports Azure Logic Apps Designer support and tooling. You can go ahead and use Visual Studio 2017 for building Logic Apps and integration related activities.
    1. Download from Cloud Explorer – Visual Studio 2017 now supports Cloud Explorer so that you can look at your live Logic Apps, run history directly from Visual Studio. Even if you’ve got Visual 2015/2017, this is one feature you got to know. In Cloud Explorer, if you find one of your Logic Apps that you built in the portal, you will also notice a small Download button (in Visual Studio). When you click this button, you will get a complete template version of the Logic App that you can use in your resource group project. Any Logic App that you create in the portal can be downloaded as a template from Visual Studio.
  2. Parallel creation in the designer – You can now add a parallel action right from the designer.  You no longer need to go to the code view to perform this operation.
  3. Select and Join actions – You now have more actions that you can perform on arrays. Let’s say you have an array of objects with properties A, B, C. You can select A & B and get a new array of objects with A & B. Similarly, for the Join action lets you take an array of objects and then using the delimiter, you can do a join and create a string out of the entries in the array.
  4. Retry information in history – The Logic Apps designer will expose what actually happened in the background during a run, the number of retries that happened during the time, the number of intermediate calls.
  5. Service Bus Sessions – You can do correlation, sequential convoys from within Logic Apps. Check out this interesting blog post published on “In-order delivery of correlated messages in Logic Apps by using Service Bus sessions“.
  6. Run navigator when looking at history – When you click on an entry in the Runs history, you will see a Run Navigator pane on the right that will be very similar to the Logic App designer view. You need not switch back between multiple screens to know the status of each run history.
  7. B2B Disaster Recovery & B2B OMS Message Download – You can implement your own DR policies and replicate the state from one region to another. This is currently available for the AS2 and X12. Support for EDIFACT will be rolled out in the coming weeks. You can watch the short demo of these two functionalities shown by Jon Fancey in this video.
  8. x-ms-dynamic support (values & schema) – For your custom APIs, you can now have dynamic values.
  9. Variables – Set – In addition to initialize and increment (discussed in the earlier Logic Apps Live webcast), you can set a variable with any value and use that variable anywhere in your Logic App
  10. Release Notes on Blade
  11. RunAfter configuration in Designer – basically to determine when the action will run. You can have a RunAfter “success” branch and a RunAfter “failure” branch.

This edition of Logic Apps Live had some cool demos on the B2B Disaster Recovery and B2B OMS Message Download. Kevin showed an interesting demo on the “Sequential Convoy” functionality and finally Jon Fancey showed an interesting upcoming feature in the Logic Apps designer (for Service Bus Queues, Topics, and Event Hub triggers). Watch them all here in the video.

[embedded content]

New Connectors

  • Azure Active Directory
  • Computer Vision API
  • Outlook Customer Manager
  • Nexmo
  • Paylocity
  • Benchmark Email
  • SQL Trigger (still in Preview)

What’s In Progress?

  1. Expression Tracing – Say, you have a condition and you want to know why the condition traversed to left (yes) or right (no). The monitoring view will now give you a full breakdown tree view of the expression and their values so that you will understand why the logic took the expected path.
  2. For-each nesting in Designer – You can have nested for-each in the code view. This functionality will be extended to the designer so that you can have a for-each within another for-each loop.
  3. Webhooks in for-each
  4. Navigate to for-each failures – The monitoring view will allow you to navigate directly into the next failed iteration instead of scrolling through the entire Logic App definition.
  5. Service Principal Authentication – Say, you have a deployment template/ARM connector or data lake that is Azure Active Directory based, instead of having to associate with user profile during sign-in, you can simply share your app id and app secret and request the system for a valid token.
  6. Array improvements in the designer
  7. Upcoming Connectors
    1. Azure Files
    2. Oracle EBS
    3. Schema support for Service Bus/Event Hub triggers
    4. ARM Invoke and Service Principal
    5. Planner
    6. Team Work
    7. PostgressSQL
    8. MQSeries Server Connections

Community Events the Logic Apps team are a part of

The Logic Apps team will be available at the following events:

  • BUILD 2017 (May 10 – 12, 2017). There is also a serverless pre-day on May 9th where there will be sessions on Azure Logic Apps and Functions and some cool Hands-On Labs and Hackathon. If you are attending BUILD 2017 or Inspire [WPC], get a chance to meet the Logic Apps team.
  • INTEGRATE 2017 (June 26-28, 2017) – Seats are already getting filled up for this premier integration focused event. If you haven’t registered for this event yet, hurry up.

If you are working on logic apps and have something interesting, feel free to share them with the Azure Logic Apps team via email or you can tweet to them at @logicappsio. You can also vote for features that you feel are important and that you’d like to see in logic apps here.

The Logic Apps team are currently running a survey to know how the product/features are useful for you as a user. The team would like to understand your experiences with the product. You can take the survey here.

If you ever wanted to get in touch with the Azure Logic Apps team, here’s how you do it!

Previous Updates

In case you missed the earlier updates from the Logic Apps team, take a look at our recap blogs here –

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – February 2017 from #MSAUIgnite

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – February 2017 from #MSAUIgnite

The Azure Logic Apps team conducted their monthly webcast earlier this morning – well, not from the same room/venue they normally do! This time it came all the way from Down Under on a bright, sunny Friday morning at Gold Coast, Australia. The entire Microsoft Pro Integration team is at Microsoft Ignite, Australia (#MSAUIgnite) and they have been having a great time talking about Logic Apps, BizTalk, API Management, Azure Service Bus and more.

Before I get into the updates from the team, a huge shout out to Jeff Hollan, Kevin Lam, Jon Fancey, and of course Jim Harrer for bringing in this session live from Australia and trying out a new outdoor experiment of the remote webcast. Well done!

Now on to the updates from the session –

What’s New?

  1. Header name-values control – Instead of having the JSON block, you can have the name-value pair in the HTTP control. However, if you want to still have the JSON block, you can get it done through the Logic Apps designer window.
  2. Updates to Portal Management Blade
    1. Clean ups to Resource blade – Users can now search for a particular run id and jump in directly to that particular run
    2. You can filter directly on the status (Flow History filter)
    3. Open a run directly
  3. Relative URL with custom methods – Say, you have a request trigger and you want to change the URL of the request trigger, this is now possible in the designer. The root name however remains the same but you still can add extensions to it. You can now create a Logic App with a GET and pass the parameters as a query string in the URL which gets passed as a token inside the Logic App.
  4. Edit Azure Function from Logic App – If you are having a Function, you will now see a link (easy one click link) from which you can jump directly to your function in the Functions blade and edit it, and come back to the designer. You no longer need to search for your functions in order to edit it.
  5. Generate JSON schema from sample payload – You can put schemas in two different places – request trigger and parse JSON action. You no longer need to go to a different website to generate the JSON Schema, instead there is a button readily available with which you can generate a JSON Schema with some sample payload. You can later edit the schema as per your requirements. This is definitely a time saving option for developers.

New SaaS Connectors

  1. Azure Automation – You can now trigger a Runbook directly from your Logic Apps. The action to run a Runbook will wait for the Runbook to complete and you can get the output from the Runbook. You can achieve a lot of Dev-Ops scenarios with this brand new Azure Automation connector.
  2. Azure Data Lake – Dump your data into the lake easily (LOL!!). Well, that’s exactly what this connector helps developers, data scientists and analysts. Store the data of any size, shape and speed easily into the Azure Data Lake using the new Azure Data Lake connector.
  3. LUIS – You can now do BOT related stuff with this connector
  4. Bing new search
  5. Basecamp 2
  6. Infusionsoft
  7. Pipedrive
  8. Eventbrite
  9. Bitbucket

New Operations

SQL on-prem stored procs – You can now get the stored procs from SQL Azure on to your on-premise installation

Improvements to Logic Apps Designer

Jeff showed a demo on the recent improvements to the Logic Apps Designer. We’ll list out some of the cool things that have been added in the last few weeks –

  1. Improved Logic Apps Designer (Templates) screen – The templates screen definitely sports a new look with a very nice video by Jeff Hollan that shows how you can get started with a Logic App in less than 5 minutes. Yes, Jeff! That deserves an Oscar (wink)! You’ve got to watch the Logic Apps Live webcast video and jump to 7:07 to understand what I mean here.
  2. Start with a common trigger – You may not want to start from a blank template all the time. So, a new section called “Start with a common trigger” has been introduced (as suggested by a fellow Program Manager at Microsoft Pro Integration Team).
  3. When creating a new Request/Response Trigger, you can now choose from a list of advanced options – the Method of the request trigger (GET, PUT, POST, PATCH, DELETE) and enter a Relative Path (e.g., /foo/{id}).

Similarly when adding an action for this trigger, the designer is now able to identify that an ‘id’ will actually be passed as a parameter with the URL, in addition to the body, header, path parameters, queries.

What’s in Progress in Azure Logic Apps?

Here’s a look at what more is expected from the Azure Logic Apps team in the coming months –

  • Variables – Once implemented, you will be able to declare variables and use them within the Logic App
  • Exposing Retries – You will be able to see the action retries, errors & successes and what the results actually were
  • Expression evaluation in Run History–  Break down of the evaluation of each workflow definition language functions in the Run History so that you can see what/how it actually evaluated
  • Convert array as table or CSV action – This is something similar to a daily/weekly digest. For e.g., you want to convert a set of tweets into a HTML table and send it as an email.
  • Service Bus namespace picker – If you are using the Service Bus connector, the connector will list all the Service Bus namespaces. You can choose the policy that you want and you can easily establish a connection with Service Bus.
  • Partner and EDIFACT tiles in OMS
  • A new region has been added – Canada!! (Well, looks like Jeff, Kevin, and Jon love Canada a lot!!!)
  • Connectors (in the pipeline)
    • Oracle DB
    • Oracle EBS
    • SQL Trigger
    • Blob trigger
    • Zendesk
    • Act!
    • Intercom
    • FreshBooks
    • Lean Kit
    • WebMerge
    • Inoreader
    • Pivotal Tracker
    • Paylocity

This was a Special Session of Firsts. Why??

At the halfway mark, again! there was a surprise on the Logic Apps webcast. Seems like a session of firsts this one!! Jeff, Kevin and Jon had a special guest – Daniel from Perth, Australia who is one of the early adopters of Logic Apps. Daniel gave a brief idea about the project that he has been working on with Logic Apps. In fact, Daniel’s integration solution spans across almost 40 different workflows and Daniel talks about the best practices to manage such a complex solution. You can watch the webcast between 13:20 and 32:40 to understand more about Daniel’s implementations and the technologies they are using.

Oh, and did I miss about one more first – Jeff’s laptop getting overheated during the course of the webinar (blazing sun and sunny day) and feel sorry for the guys to have done the recording (continuation) with Daniel at a later time.

Performance Improvements

  • Service Bus Performance
    • Triggers normally use long polling intervals, and a minimum polling interval is about 30 seconds. The Pro Integration team have now added batching to the trigger and the trigger can receive up to 175 messages/trigger.
    • The trigger limits are now increased to 3000/minute (further even upto 6000/minute as testings are underway) from existing 2000/minute
    • Auto complete actions can now handle about 300 messages/second, and this will increase further with more connections and Logic Apps
  • Limitless
    • Larger messages
    • Higher throughput
    • Increased limits on foreach and other logical constructs

Community Content

Towards the end of the session, the team pointed out on the upcoming Global Integration Bootcamp event happening on March 25, 2017 around the world. As on date, the event is happening in 11 different locations – Australia, UK, USA, Belgium, Finland, Norway, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, India, and Sweden.

Did You Know? BizTalk360 is proud to organize the Global Integration Bootcamp in 2 out of the 11 locations – UK and India.

You can sign up for these events by clicking the following links:
UK – Register Today
India – Register Today

If you are working on logic apps and have something interesting, feel free to share them with the Azure Logic Apps team via email or you can tweet to them at @logicappsio. You can also vote for features that you feel are important and that you’d like to see in logic apps here.

The Logic Apps team are currently running a survey to know how the product/features are useful for you as a user. The team would like to understand your experiences with the product. You can take the survey here.

If you ever wanted to get in touch with the Azure Logic Apps team, here’s how you do it!

You can watch the full video here to get a feel of the new features that were discussed during the webcast.

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Previous Updates

In case you missed the earlier updates from the Logic Apps team, take a look at our recap blogs here –

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan