Integrate 2017 USA Day 2 Recap

by Eldert Grootenboer | Oct 26, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

And so the second day of Integrate 2017 USA is a fact, another day of great sessions and action packed demos. We started the day with Mayank Sharma and Divya Swarnkar from Microsoft CSE, formerly Microsoft IT, taking us through their journey to the cloud. Microsoft has an astounding amount of integrations running for all their internal processes, communicating with 1000+ partners. With 175+ BizTalk servers running on Azure IaaS, doing 170M+ messages per month, they really need a integration platform they can rely on.

Like most companies, Microsoft is also looking into ways to modernize their application landscape, as well as to reduce costs. To accomplish this, they now are using Logic Apps at the heart of all their integrations, using BizTalk as their bridge to their LOB systems. By leveraging API Management they can test their systems in production as well as in their UAT environments, ensuring that all systems work as expected. By using the options the Azure platform provides for geo replication they ensure that even in case of a disaster their business will stay up and running.

Adopting a microservices strategy, each Logic App is set up to perform a specific task, and meta data is used to execute or skip specific parts. To me this seems like a great setup, and definitely something to look into when setting up your own integrations.

Manage API lifecycle sunrise to sunset with Azure API Management

The second session of the day we had Matthew Farmer and Anton Babadjanov showing us how we can use API Management to set up an API using a design first approach. Continuing on the scenario of Contoso Fitness, they set up the situation where you need to onboard a partner to an API which has not been built yet. By using API Management we can set up a façade for the API, adding it’s methods and mock responses, allowing consumers to start working with the API quickly.

Another important subject is how you handle new versions of your API. Thanks to API Management you can now have versions and revisions of your API. Versions allow you to have different implementations of your API living next to each other publically available to your consumers, where revisions allow you to have a private new version of your API, in which you can develop and test changes. Once you are happy with the changes done in the revision, you can publish it with a click of the button, making the new revision the public API. This is very powerful, as it allows us to safely test our changes, and easily roll back in case of any issues.

Thanks to API Management we have the complete lifecycle of our API’s covered, going from our initial design, through the ALM story, all the way up to updating and deprovisioning.

Azure Logic Apps – Advanced integration patterns

Next up are Jeff Hollan and Derek Li, taking us behind the scenes of Logic Apps. Because the massive scale these need to run on, there are many new challenges which needed to be solved. Logic Apps does this by reading in the workflow definition, and breaking it down into a composition of tasks and dependencies. These tasks are then distributed across various workers, each executing their own piece of the tasks. This allows for a high degree of parallelism, which is why they can scale out indefinitely. Having this information, it’s important to take this with us in our scenarios, thinking about how this might impact us. This includes keeping in mind tasks might not be processed in order, and at high scale, so we need to take this into account on our receiving systems. Also, as Logic Apps provides at-least-once delivery, so we should look into idempotency for our systems.

Derek Li showed us different kinds of patterns which can be used with Logic Apps, including parallel processing, exception handling, looping, timeouts, and the ability to control the concurrency, which will be coming to the portal in the coming week. Using these patterns, Derek created a Logic App which sent out an approval email, and by adjusting the timeout and setting up exception handling on this, escalating to the approver’s manager in case the approval was not processed within the timeout. These kinds of scenarios show us how powerful Logic Apps has become, truly allowing for a customized flow.

Bringing Logic Apps into DevOps with Visual Studio and monitoring

After some mingling with like minded people during the break at Integrate 2017 USA, it’s now time for another session by Kevin Lam and Jeff Hollan, which is always a pleasure to see. In this session we dive into the story around DevOps and ALM for Logic Apps. These days Logic Apps is a first class citizen within Visual Studio, allowing us to create and modify them, pulling in and controlling existing Logic Apps from Azure.

As the Logic Apps designer creates ARM templates, we can also add these to source control like VSTS. By using the CI/CD possibilities of VSTS, we can then automatically deploy our Logic Apps, allowing for a completely automated deployment process.

Integrating the last mile with Microsoft Flow

As pro-integrators Microsoft Flow might not be the first tool coming to mind, but actually this is a very interesting service. It allows us to create light weight integrations, giving room to the idea of democratization of integration. There is a plethora of templates available for Flow, allowing users to easily automate tasks, accessing both online and on-premises data. With custom connectors give us the option to expose any system we want to. And being categorized in verticals, users will be able to quickly find templates which are useful for them.

Flow also has the option to use buttons, which can be both physical buttons, from Flic or bttn, or programmatic in the Flow app. This allows for on-demand flows to be executed by the click of a button, and sharing these within your company. For those who want more control over the flows that can be built, and the data that can be accessed, there is the Admin center, which is available with Flow Plan 2.

Looking at the updates which has happened over the last few months, it’s clear the team has been working hard, making Flow ready for your enterprise.

And even more great things are about to come, so make sure to keep an eye on this.

Deep dive into BizTalk technologies and tools

Yesterday (on Day 1 on Integrate 2017 USA), we heard the announcement of Feature Pack 2 for BizTalk. For me, one of the coolest features that will be coming is the ability to publish BizTalk endpoints through Azure API Management. This will allow us to easily expose the endpoint, either via SOAP pass-through or even with SOAP to REST, and take advantage of all the possibilities API Management brings us, like monitoring, throttling, authentication, etc. And all this, with just a right click on the port in BizTalk, pretty amazing.

As we had seen in the first session of today, Microsoft has a huge integration landscape. With that many applications and artifacts, migration to a new BizTalk version can become quite the challenge. To overcome this, Microsoft IT created the BizTalk Server Migration Tool, and published the tool for us as well. The tool takes care of migrating your applications to a new BizTalk environment, taking care of dependencies, services, certificates and everything else.

Looking at the numbers, we can see how much effort this saves, and minimizing the risks of errors. The tool supports migration to BizTalk 2016 from any version from BizTalk 2010, and is certainly a great asset for anyone looking into migration. So if you are running an older version of BizTalk, remember to migrate in time, to avoid running out of the support timelines we have seen yesterday.

What’s there & what’s coming in BizTalk360

Next up we had Saravana Kumar, CEO of BizTalk360 and founding father of Integrate, guiding us through his top 10 features of BizTalk360. Having worked with the product since its first release, I can only say it has gone through an amazing journey, and has become the de-facto monitoring solution for BizTalk and its surrounding systems. It helps solving the challenges anyone who has been administrating BizTalk, giving insights in your environment, adding monitoring and notifications, and giving fine-grained security control.

So Saravana’s top 10 of BizTalk360 is as following, and I pretty much agree on all of them.

1. Rich operational dashboards, showing you the health of your environment in one single place

2. Fine grained security and auditing, so you can give your users access to only those things they need, without the need to opening up your complete system

3. Graphical message flow, providing an end to end view of your message flows

4. Azure + BizTalk Server (single management tool), because Azure is becoming very important in most integrations these days

5. Monitoring – complete coverage, allowing us monitor and, even more importantly, be notified on any issue in your environment

6. Data (no events) monitoring, giving us monitoring on what’s not happening as well, for example expected messages not coming in

7. Auto healing – from failures, to make sure your environment keeps running, automatically coming back up after issues, either from mechanical or human causes

8. Scheduled reporting, which will be coming in the next version, creating reports about your environment on a regular basis

9. Analytics & messaging patterns, giving even more insights in what is happening using graphical charts and widgets

10. Throttling analyser, because anyone who has ever needed to solve a throttling problem knows how difficult this can be, having to keep track of various performance counters, this feature allows a nice graphical overview and historical insights

11. Team knowledgebase, so one more bonus feature that should really be addressed, the knowledgebase is used to link articles to specific errors and faults, making sure this knowledge is readily available in your company

Of course, this is not all, BizTalk360 has a lot more great features, and I can recommend anyone to go and check it.

Give your Bots connectivity, with Azure Logic Apps

Kent Weare, former MVP and now Principal Program Manager within Microsoft on Flow team, takes us on a journey into bots, and giving them connectivity with Logic Apps and Flow. First setting the stage, we all have heard about digital transformation, but what is it all about? Digital transformation has become a bit of a buzzword, but the idea behind it is actually quite intriguing, which is using digital means to provide more value and new business models. The following quote shows this quite nicely.

“Digital transformation is the methodology in which organizations transform, create new business models and culture with digital technologies” – Ray Wang, Constellation Research

An important part here is the culture in the organization will need to change as well, so go out and become a change agent within your organization.

Next we go on to bots, which can be used to reduce barriers and empower users through conversational apps. With the rise of various messenger applications like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, there is a huge market to be reached here. There are many different kinds of bots, but they all have a common way of working, often incorporating cognitive services like Language Understanding Intelligence Service (LUIS) to make the bot more human friendly.

When we want to build our own bots, we have different possibilities here as well, depending on your background and skills. Kent had a great slide on this, making it clear you don’t have to be a pro integrator anymore to make compelling bots.

In his demos, Kent showed the different implementations on how to build a bot. The first is using the bot framework with Logic Apps and Cognitive Services to make a complex bot, allowing for a completely tailored bot. For the other two demos, he used Microsoft flow in combination with Bizzy, a very cool connector which allows us to create a “question-answer bot”, analyzing the input from the user and making decisions on it. Finally the ability to migrate Flow implementations to Logic Apps was demonstrated, allowing users to start a simple integration in Flow, but having the ability to seamlessly migrate these to Logic Apps when more complexity is needed over the lifecycle of the integration.

Empowering the business using Logic Apps

And closing this second day of Integrate 2017 USA, we had Steef-Jan Wiggers, with a view from the business side on Logic Apps. A very interesting session, as instead of just going deep down into the underlying technologies, he actually went and looked for the business value we can add using these technologies, which in the end is what it is all about. Serverless integration is a great way to provide value for your business, lowering costs and allowing for easy and massive scaling.

Steef-Jan went out to several companies who are actually using and implementing Azure, including Phidiax, MyTE, Mexia and ServiceBus360. The general consensus amongst them, is Logic Apps and the other Azure services are indeed adding value to their business, as it gives them the ability to set up new powerful scenarios fast and easy.

With several great demos and customer cases Steef-Jan made very visible how he has already helped many customers with these integrations to add value to their business. The integration platform as a service is here to stay, and according to Gartner iPaaS will actually be the preferred option for new projects by 2019. And again, he has gone out and this time went to the community leaders and experts, to get their take on Logic Apps. The conclusion here is these days Logic Apps is a mature and powerful tool in the iPaaS integration platform.

So that was the end of the second day at Integrate 2017 USA, another day full of great sessions, inspiring demos, and amazing presenters. With one more day to go, Integrate 2017 USA is again one of the best events out there.

Check out the recap of Day 1 and Day 3 at Integrate 2017 USA.

Author: Eldert Grootenboer

Eldert is a Microsoft Integration Architect and Azure MVP from the Netherlands, currently working at Motion10, mainly focused on IoT and BizTalk Server and Azure integration. He comes from a .NET background, and has been in the IT since 2006. He has been working with BizTalk since 2010 and since then has expanded into Azure and surrounding technologies as well. Eldert loves working in integration projects, as each project brings new challenges and there is always something new to learn. In his spare time Eldert likes to be active in the integration community and get his hands dirty on new technologies. He can be found on Twitter at @egrootenboer and has a blog at http://blog.eldert.net/. View all posts by Eldert Grootenboer

Integrate 2017 USA Day 1 Recap

by Martin Abbott | Oct 26, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

And we’re off, the USA leg of the Integrate conference started today in Building 92 on the Microsoft campus in Redmond.

Saravana kicked off proceedings by setting the scene and giving us an indication of who we’re going to see over the next two and a half days.

It’s a good line up with speakers from the Microsoft integration teams and some great community speakers.

There was a shout out for Integration Monday and Middleware Friday, two awesome community efforts supported by Saravana and BizTalk360.

Saravana was followed by Duncan Barker from BizTalk360 who explained that BizTalk360 has now grown to 50 people and spoke about ServiceBus360 and how that has grown and continues to be developed.

Duncan also teased about 2 new products that are coming in 2018 so that’s definitely something to look out for and mentioned that work is already underway for Integrate 2018 so watch your mailboxes for more information on that as the plans begin to take shape.

With the introductions and scene setting done, it was time for the leader of the awesome integration team to take the stage.

Jim Harrer – Limitless Possibilities with Azure Integration Services

Jim’s message was very much one of integration being the connective tissue that all solutions need to tie things together, reinforcing that there is ongoing investment in BizTalk Server and the story that Logic Apps and BizTalk Server are Better Together.

With over 180 connectors now in Logic Apps, including many that integrate directly with Azure Services, it is possible to more effectively build integration solutions that span on-premises and cloud and really accelerate adoption through hybrid integration, and taking an API first approach is a great way to unlock business value.

Jim then moved on to serverless, a platform that is just there ready for you to use when you need it.

With serverless, you get improved build and delivery, reduced time to market and per action billing and it really flips traditional development on its head.

The Pro Integration team has had a busy year, and this was shown in a single slide.

This shows just how quickly things are changing and evolving and has included things like Logic Apps going GA, feature packs being introduced for BizTalk and API Mocking which has allowed teams to be more agile and progress at greater speed, making it possible to deliver integration solutions in weeks rather than months.

This agility has led to integration getting a seat at the table instead of being an afterthought.

We then had some great demos from Jon Fancey, Kevin Lam and Jeff Hollan who introduced the demo scenario that would be used throughout the conference, Contoso Fitness.

Jon kicked off the demos with a Logic App calling Spotify. This allowed him to show the new Custom Connector and a great resource, https://apis.guru/browse-apis/.

Kevin followed up looking at Azure Security Center and showed the tooling that was introduced at Microsoft Ignite recently. This provides integration directly between Azure Security Center and Logic Apps, including playbooks that are templates which integrate directly into typical service management tools such as Service Now.

Jeff did the last demo on Logic Apps and Cognitive Services. This showed the power of using the Video Indexer API and the ability to spin up a Docker container through a connector that will be released shortly. This container used FFMPEG, an open source tool, to take the transcript generated by the indexer and apply the information as subtitles in the video.

We finished with Jim urging everyone to maximise the value of their projects using integration.

Final message:

“Now is the time for integrators to unlock the impossible”

Paul Larsen – BizTalk – Connecting line-of-business applications across the Enterprise

Paul opened his presentation with a great image of a green screen, a mainframe that is running on campus.

This set the scene for a great presentation and dive into BizTalk and heritage systems. Paul insisted on calling them heritage rather than legacy, as heritage is something you celebrate and love whilst legacy has a number of negative connotations!

Paul again emphasized the importance of hybrid integration between BizTalk and the cloud, and the message really started resonating. He spent some time positioning BizTalk and how it had changed along with Host Integration Server over the years he has been on the team.

For me, his demo involving Contoso Fitness showcasing mobile applications, Logic Apps, virtual machines, HL7 and a mainframe was one of the best of the day. It showcased hybrid integration with the Logic Apps adapter, and the real breadth and depth of the Microsoft integration story.

Paul explained the reasoning behind the Feature Pack releases, how it was able to deliver new value at a quicker cadence by introducing non-breaking changes and he reviewed what had been delivered in Feature Pack 1.

The information was split between Deployment – application lifecycle management; Runtime – advanced scheduling, SQL encryption columns and web admin; and Analytics – AppInsights for tracking and the Power BI template.

He then mentioned that Feature Pack 2 would be released next month!

Splitting the information the same way we had Deployment – application lifecycle management for multiple servers and backup to Blob Storage; Runtime – Adapter for Service Bus v2, TLS 1.2 (although this may be in the next Cumulative Update as it is a critical update), using API Management to expose Orchestration endpoints, and sending/receiving from Event Hub; Analytics – sending data to Event Hub for tracking.

He walked through the BizTalk Server Support Lifecycle.

This shows that BizTalk Server 2013/2013 R2 is out of mainstream support in 9 months and that people should at least starting thinking about migrating. NOTE: A cool tool to help with this migration was presented by Microsoft IT on Day 2 and is available for use.

The most important slide was the BizTalk Roadmap.

This clearly shows an ongoing commitment to the product with a timeline for CUs, Feature Packs, and BizTalk vNext.

With that Paul wrapped up we had a break followed by Jeff and Kevin.

Jeff Hollan/Kevin Lam – Azure Logic Apps – build cloud-scale integrations faster

You always know you’re in for a great session when these two stand up, and this session did not disappoint.

It was aimed a level setting session to get people across Logic Apps, what they are and why you’d use them.

To help emphasize the growth of the service, Kevin mentioned that at GA in June 2016 there were about two dozen connectors, now there are nearly 200!

Connectors provide a canonical form for integration that scale to meets the needs of the customer.

A slide was shown that had an animation of the current connectors that went on for a few pages and included colours to indicate connectors to Azure Services (blue) and those to other Microsoft services (orange), along with a list of others really showing how much coverage Logic Apps has.

One of the new features was shown – custom connectors.

Custom connectors are available now and treated just the same as any other connector, including storing secrets in the Logic Apps secret store just like regular connectors.

These conferences are great on their own, but when the teams share what’s next and any roadmap information it is particularly interesting. With that, we were teased with what connectors and services are coming soon.

These include the ability to initialize and destroy containers within the Azure Container Service, Oracle EBS and high availability for the on-premises data gateway. I am particularly interested in the container story and can see this as a great way of running transient compute workloads easily and only when required.

We then moved on to more level setting and to how agile the Logic Apps team is, highlighted by a slide that showed what they have shipped this year, including Visual Studio tooling, nested foreach loops and Ludicrous Mode that allows sharding across the infrastructure to improve performance. Currently, the cadence is roughly a release every two weeks!

To highlight this agility, even more, they showed what was coming soon to the service.

Particularly interesting is mocking testing to allow you to stub out connectors that are still being built, being able to resubmit from a failed action rather than an entire run, concurrency control to allow control of how parallel foreach loops run which can be important in ordered delivery scenarios and snippets which allow you to create some reusability across your Logic Apps.

The new pricing model that comes into effect on 1st November was shown. This has a 32x reduction in the cost of native actions, 6.5x reduction in the cost of standard connectors and bringing enterprise connectors inline with other connects based on pay per execution.

The pricing changes also applied to integration account with them coming to a third of their previous price.

With that Jeff wrapped up with another great demo for Contoso Fitness showing how to integrate a Flic button to emulate a customer pushing a button on a fitness machine when it needed maintenance or cleaning, sending an alert via an HTTP trigger to ServiceNow.

We then had a change in presentation order, with Vlad and Miao covering API Management.

Vladimir Vinogradsky/Miao Jiang – Bolster your digital transformation with Azure API Management

Vlad provided a great overview of API Management and showed how APIs, in general, is really the common component of any solution, whether that is a Software as a Service product or the Internet of Things.

He continued by explaining how API Management is positioned and how it can be used to drive loyalty, build new services and channels to market and how it can help cope with multi-speed IT where not every part of a solution or business wants the same pace of change.

Vlad continued with a general overview of policies and how to use them to enforce certain things like access control and rate limits, and how you can chain them together by explaining the scope and the cumulative nature of policies.

After a discussion about security, the conversation moved on to the inclusion of VNets to help control access to on-premises APIs and then multi-region support and scaling that is available as a premium feature. This allows

you to deploy units of scale across regions, includes request caching out of the box, allows incremental growth of APIs, and allows different scales in different regions. It is a great way to grow your APIs as your business grows.

Miao then did a great demo, showing the key features of the service, firstly showing how to create an API, including SOAP to REST to allow more modern access to heritage APIs.

Using the Developer Portal to allow testing of the APIs he showed how to apply a number of policies such as removing headers, replacing backend URLs and rate limiting, followed by using the tracing feature to gain insight into the information passed to and from an API call and what policies are applied.

Any enterprise solution requires in-depth insight, so Miao moved on to monitoring and using Metrics in the Azure Portal to set alerts and using it to call a Logic App followed by the Diagnostic settings and Log Searching.

We then moved to looking at the new Power BI template that can be deployed with a single click.

This looks like a great way of delivering insight into an API Management deployment and has been created based on customer asks. It uses Event Hubs, Stream Analytics, and SQL Database.

After a slide that showed the growth in API Management, Vlad then showed how much work has been done in the last 12 months.

Like the other presentations, this shows just how agile and engaged the team is and how they are really delivering value to us as users of their service.

With that Vlad provided a list of resources and closed out the morning session.

After lunch, we had 3 presentations on the messaging services within Azure that took proceeding up to the afternoon break.

Dan Rosanova – Messaging yesterday, today and tomorrow

After lunch, Dan kicked off sessions about the messaging services in Azure starting with his own presentation about tools and how Microsoft is really a tools company.

Using a hammer for illustration, Dan gave a great presentation on where a hammer is a right tool and where a hammer is not. This included an unusual demo that showed how to open a beer with a hammer live on stage!

And really that was the main thrust of the presentation, that with Azure messaging being such a large set of tools, it is important to choose the right tool for the job.

To further hammer home the point, he talked about 3 scenarios to fit these tools:

• Task Queue using a Storage Queue to coordinate simple tasks across compute
• Big data streaming using Event Hub to flow and process data and telemetry in real-time
• Enterprise Messaging using Service Bus to manage business process state transitions
• Eventing using Event Grid to provide a reactive programming model

Dan summed up by saying that Event Grid will be GAed soon and indicated that some new services outside Azure are coming.

Shubha Vijayasarathy – Azure Event Hubs: the world’s most widely used telemetry service

Shubha set the scene using a big data scenario and how Event Hub can be used to provide a single service solution to common problems around telemetry and data pipelines.

She moved on to how Event Hub answers all the typical questions asked about big data solutions, such as how do you handle data that has velocity, volume, and variety, can you deal with regional disasters and do real-time streaming as well as batch capture, what can Event Hub integrate with, and how can you handle support. Again, for any production solution, it is important to be able to lift the covers and see what is happening and how a solution is performing.

Shubha did a great demo showing how to use Event Hubs and Event Grid to move stream data into SQL Datawarehouse using the Capture feature of Event Hub that allows you to persist the telemetry data into a storage account. This demo used an Azure Function to react to an Event Grid event that was fired due to a storage file being created to process data into SQL DW.

Leaving the best until last Shubha gave some indication of what was coming soon from the team.

This includes the general availability of Geo DR, IP filtering and VNet support and a portal experience for creating dedicated clusters.

We then had a bonus session for the day that was not scheduled.

Christian Wolf – Azure Service Bus: Who doesn’t know it?

So Dan covered the messaging services available, Shubha covered Event Hubs and Christian on to cover one of the oldest services in Azure.

This was a shorter but highly focussed session that started with what is new and soon to be released in Service Bus.

He went through the important points of the slide, including that the Event Grid scenario is for lower volumes and not millions of messages. They are introducing Geo DR for Service Bus that will allow you to pair 2 independent namespaces and access them through an alias. NOTE: In this first release it is only metadata that is failed over between regions, not the data that is on any Service Bus asset.

A good point was made about the .NET Standard Client. It has been breaking changes, so Christian urged anyone wanting to adopt it to spend time in the release notes and testing.

Christian then did a couple of good demos, the first using Service Bus, and Event Grid to simulate Clemens Vasters wanting to buy an airplane (so a likely scenario!), and using Dynamics 365 to react to a new sales opportunity. The second demo showed the Geo DR capabilities and showed that monitoring not entirely straightforward. Christian used ServiceBus360 to help drive demo.

Christian finished with what’s next for Service Bus.

This includes a capability to allow migration between standard and premium SKUs, a new management library, the introduction of throttling in the standard SKU, which is not dedicated, to eliminate noisy neighbours and Data DR as a broader part of the disaster recovery strategy.

This led to the final break of the day, with 2 more presentations standing between attendees and Scott Guthrie’s keynote.

Eduardo Laureano – Azure Functions – Serverless compute in the cloud

We started with an overview of Functions and the components of the service.

Eduardo explained how Functions evolved, it came from App Service so HTTP has always been a native part of the service.

Eduardo showed the bindings and triggers, ut directed people to the documentation for an up-to-date list.

Following up with a discussion about developer tooling the discussion then turned to Functions by the numbers. The key takeaway from that was when customers go to Functions they are continuing to move more things over time as they evolve their ecosystems.

Eduardo did a demo that really showed the power of bindings by walking through the Function creation process for a Blob Storage trigger, performing a simple file upload, changing the input from Stream to byte[] and showing that it just still works exactly the same way.

After speaking about the difference between Function bindings and Logic Apps connectors (low code v no code, 23 bindings v 180+ connectors, ideal for data flow v ideal for workflow orchestration, data type in code v fully managed) Eduardo explained that as Functions is open source, anyone can go and create a new custom binding, and that he’d be happy to discuss having more community contributed bindings in the service.

We then moved on to the new Microsoft Graph binding announced at Ignite.

This provides a way of finding correlations across different data sets, but the real magic is that it incorporates identity so you don’t have to.

We had 2 demos, the first showing the Graph binding, and the second showing the new Excel binding with data being added to an Excel file.

Proxies is a recently added feature that will be going GA soon, so Eduardo spent some time explaining how it works and did a great demo showing how you can use proxies for URL redirection and mocking of responses since you can specify a response payload. He then gave some scenarios where you may want to use proxies.

Like most of the presentations during the day, he finished with a list of takeaways and resources.

The final presentation of the day before Scott was delivered by Jon Fancey.

Jon Fancey – Enterprise Integration with Logic Apps

Jon started by level setting and explaining that the Integration Account in Azure is the basic unit of work for Enterprise Integration.

He explained about the XML and B2B capabilities that are provided with the Integration Account and talked about DR scenarios which are important to consider as Integration Accounts hold stateful information. DR is achieved by having a Primary and (multiple) Secondary Integration Accounts in different regions, and the service uses Logic Apps to keep Integration Account states in sync.

Jon moved on to trading partner migration and a tool (TPM) that has been written to allow customers to easily move trading partners and agreements between BizTalk Server and Logic Apps.

Jon gave an explanation of the traditional VETER pipeline and then moved to what is new in mapping.

With this, he introduced Liquid which allows mapping between different entity types using a DSL and did a demo of it using Visual Studio code.

After talking about the tracking features in Logic Apps, Jon gave us a glimpse of what was coming in Monitoring.

Key takeaways from this list are the OMS template and work around harmonizing the querying capabilities to bring it inline with AppInsights.

Jon did a demo to highlight these features showing OMS in the portal, drilling through the data, showing batch resubmit by looking at Runs and selecting, and tracked properties containing your own tracking, then showed taking a Query and creating a custom tile in the OMS workspace.

Next up for the “new” treatment was connectors.

There had already been the discussion about custom connectors earlier in the day but it was great to see SOAP to REST, which shipped the same day, to allow even more opportunities to leverage current investments.

Time for another demo, this time looking at SOAP to REST using a custom connector. This was a great demo that involved Jon changing a SOAP app on the fly, adding a new custom connector, then running the service and a great He Man reference, “By the Power of GreySkull”, always a bonus!

Jon talked about the new batching feature and then gave us a view of what was new and coming.

The last demo of the day showed off the batching feature before Jon did a quick recap and showed some resources.

That was the end of the first day prior to the Keynote, and what a great day it was. There was plenty of information for people who had some knowledge but wanted to learn more and the presenters were very goofing at getting an idea of the level of the audience.

With great demos, great presentations and great presenters the conference got off to a real bang.

The only thing that was left after this was the man in the red polo shirt, but let’s cover that in its own post!

Integration 2017 USA Keynote

by Martin Abbott | Oct 25, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

After a great start and some great content on Day 1 at Integrate 2017 USA it was time for the keynote, Jim Harrer returned to introduce the man known as ScottGu, the man in the red shirt.

Fresh off the back of his Red Shirt Tour, Scott Guthrie took to the stage to deliver a presentation to wrap up Day 1 of Integrate 2017 USA.

He started by asking the question, what are the big opportunities for integration?

He echoed Jim’s sentiment earlier in the day that integration is the glue and an essential part of any enterprise solution.

As Integrate 2017 USA is a technical conference, he wanted to show some buzzwords and terms.

Integration has a part to play everywhere, he said now is the time, time to build new things, new solutions.

Furthermore, he went as far as to say that integration is now transformational, creating new revenue streams and services, reinventing the way we do business, but security is critical.

We need to be using Azure to do things differently; in a productive way, a hybrid way, an intelligent way and a trusted way.

He spoke about the reach of Azure with an unparalleled capability to reach a global audience with 42 Azure regions, providing a global reach for global business, and a great fact, 20% of all power for Ireland is used in North Europe data centre!

He showed a great video about what a data centre looks like which gave a glimpse in to just how impressive the Azure cloud is.

But Azure is also a Trusted Cloud.

Azure has more certifications than any rival cloud provider, and provides a guarantee that regional data stays in the region and fails over across paired regions. Germany and China have specific data requirements so their data has even more protections.

Scott then shared that 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Azure.

Time for another video, this one on customers using Azure including Asos, Dominos, Rockwell Automation and Geico.

Scott calls out integration again as the enabler of all these scenarios, one of the most critical components of the overall stack that delivers the value.

Next up is a great summary slide that shows the technology at play in Microsoft Azure across tools, advanced workloads and core infrastructure.

Integration is an important part of this, as is hybrid cloud.

Time for Scott to do some demos and showcase some integration scenarios.

The first demo is a backend solution driven by AI and data to create workflows. In this demo we see a Twitter analysis Logic App that monitors social networks, uses Cognitive Services to detect sentiment and perform key phrase extraction. The phrases are then analysed in a Function, and rows added to a PBI dataset.

The final part of the puzzle is sending a message to Microsoft Teams if the sentiment < 0.3 and creating a case in Dynamics 365 for support follow up.

This solution is live and used right now, Azure Support is currently able to reach out within three and a half minutes to follow up when negative sentiment is detected.

One curiosity was when showing Microsoft Teams, it clearly showed that not everything that seems negative is negative!

The second demo was based on a customer visit, a fitness organisation, and was built within the customer meeting and demonstrated Azure’s ability to solve real world problems and address pain points.

The demo used a PowerApp to take a picture, then use the Face API in Cognitive Services to do gym sign up and check in.

Now back to the slides, integration combined with other services provides much more possibility, and is better than a pure integration play.

Another quick demo showing how to create a new database, then talking about the capabilities of SQL Database including Point In Time recovery, and recommendations for optimising and auto tuning.

This was then extending to talk about SQL Injection and how the SQL Database service has threat analytics built in and how it can automatically block or take other actions as required when it perceives a threat.

Scott moved on to Virtual Machines and showed how to manage them, including the capability to manage multiple computers at once, you can look at Update management (patch management), and look at compliance of VM patching including Windows, Linux and non-Azure computers.

Using VM Inventory allows visibility on what VMs there are and their capabilities, then looking at Change tracking to show what has changed, files, registry settings, software and also supports managing multiple VMs at once making operators more efficient.

All of these demos really allow Scott to show that Azure has such a rich set of features with such a huge breadth.

Back to the core message to finish, integration is at the centre for connecting things together, and we can do it productively to deliver quickly, we can do it in a hybrid way to join cloud and on-premises, we can do it intelligently using AI and Cognitive Services and we can do it in a trusted way on a cloud that is compliant and secure.

With that Scott wrapped up and the first day concluded at Integrate 2017 USA, a day full of knowledge, information and humour.