How Can You Use AIS to Adapt Your Integration Platform to Azure Services?

In the first two articles in our series on integration, we explained the importance of having an integration platform within an Information System (IS), then looked at how to design this platform and the technical challenges involved. In this third part, we’ll take a practical look at implementing the architecture we’ve designed using Azure resources. We’ll use Microsoft’s Azure Integration Services (AIS) suite to achieve this.

What Is AIS?

AIS is a suite of cloud services offered by Microsoft within its Azure platform. Its primary goal is to make it easier to integrate applications, data, and processes into a company’s information system, whether they are hosted locally, in the cloud, or at the edge.

This suite of services includes a variety of tools for designing, deploying, and managing advanced integration solutions. It enables companies to connect their systems, automate their workflows, and optimize their operations. The services included in AIS are:

• Azure Logic Apps
• Azure API Management
• Azure Service Bus
• Azure Event Grid
• Azure Functions
• Data Factory

These components offer a wide range of functions to meet the most diverse integration needs.

Azure Integration Service

Now that we’ve identified the services included in AIS, let’s examine each one and some of their use cases in more detail.

The Various AIS Services and Their Use Cases

API Management

The Azure API Management service is a complete solution for managing and securely exposing APIs. It provides two main functions: comprehensive cataloging of APIs and their management. It enables the secure exposure of back-end APIs to internal and external customers through a consistent user interface for developers. It also centralizes the creation of a single API catalog. This provides a global view and management of deployed APIs.

API Management Use Cases

• Manage a large-scale API management strategy in a single service.
• Unify these APIs with a single entry point while ensuring compliance with norms and standards.
• Implement common authentication and authorization rules to protect APIs from unauthorized access.

Logic Apps

Logic Apps are workflow services designed to simplify the creation and execution of automated workflows in a low-code model. These components are ideal for low-volume processing and for orchestrating complex processes. Hundreds of connectors make integrating and connecting to applications like SAP, SalesForce, SQL Database, and more easy.

Logic Apps Use Cases

• Manage workflows that require information to be retrieved from third-party partners before sending the message to the target partner.
• Be able to transform data between the original message format and the format expected by the target system.
• Typically, this service is used to orchestrate the various stages of a workflow.

Azure Functions

Azure Functions provides an agile, scalable solution for handling complex workloads. Its functions are specifically designed to handle low-volume transformations, and can be used to create custom connectors where none exist, or to handle special cases during orchestration. They offer total flexibility to meet specific needs, enabling the deployment of customized solutions.

Azure Functions Use Cases

• The service can handle Logic Apps use cases in a more programmatic way, which can result in longer implementation times.
• Implement complex or partner-specific business rules or workflows.

Service Bus

The Service Bus is a message management service. With its message queue functionality, this service provides a reliable and scalable solution for event-driven processing, where data is exchanged asynchronously between different applications. As an enterprise message broker, it also offers advanced features such as queues or topics (in a publish-subscribe model) to ensure the consistency and reliability of message exchanges.

Service Bus Use Cases

• Decouples application components, enabling them to communicate asynchronously.
• Allows you to route messages to the right partners based on differentiating factors.
• Process batches of messages by grouping them in a queue before processing them en masse later.
• In hybrid platforms, it connects on-premises systems such as BizTalk to Azure services.
• Create a point of persistence in the processing of exchanges to improve their resilience.

Event Grid

Azure Event Grids provide an efficient solution for routing events, including high-frequency events. As an event-routing component based on a publish-subscribe model, this service simplifies the integration of event-driven applications by facilitating asynchronous, distributed communication. With the ability to handle many event types, whether they originate from internal systems, are customized, or come from third-party sources, Azure Event Grids offer exceptional versatility to meet the most diverse connectivity needs.

Azure Event Grid Use Cases

• Automate the triggering of workflows, such as processing files stored in Azure Storage.
• Manage event workflows from Internet of Things (IoT) devices. For example, sending alerts when temperatures change in industrial refrigerators.
• Automate management and respond to events from other Azure services. For example, trigger alerts when an Azure service goes down.

Data Factory

Azure Data Factory is an advanced data management solution, especially for high-volume data. As a data integration engine, it enables the creation of ETL/ELT pipelines adapted to high-volume interfaces. Azure Data Factory provides a robust, scalable platform for managing large data loads. With multiple built-in connectors, this service makes connecting to and exchanging data with other cloud services, on-premises or third-party solutions much easier.

Now these services have been identified, let’s try to incorporate these different building blocks into an integration platform architecture diagram.

Azure Data Factory Use Cases

• Manage the transfer of large volumes of files to destination partners.
• Data warehouse or data lake loading from multiple data sources, with or without business rule-driven transformations.
• This service will also be the successor to the SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) tool.

How Can AIS Services Be Incorporated into the Integration Architecture?

In our second article, we presented an example of the conceptual architecture of an integration platform. We’ll take this example again and try to illustrate each component with a service from the AIS suite (see the diagram below), thus addressing the main functionalities of a mediation platform, which are as follows:

• API management with API Management, possibly supplemented with API Apps for developing platform-specific APIs.
• Messaging and event management with Service Bus and Event Hub.
• Workflow management with Logic Apps, supported by Azure Functions to handle specific cases.
• High-volume exchange requirements with Data Factory.

Example of a conceptual architecture for an integration platform with AIS services

This example shows that AIS services are essential for integration platforms. However, they are not sufficient to ensure the viability of a platform and must be supplemented with other services to meet other essential needs in the cloud:

• Identity provider: Azure Active Directory
• CI/CD: Azure DevOps
• Network: Virtual network, private endpoint, application gateway, etc.
• Storage: Key Vault for identification information and other secrets, and a storage account

What You Need to Know about Azure Integration Services

In conclusion, we looked in-depth at the AIS suite, its key components, and their use cases in the context of integration platforms. In this article, we’ve looked at how each service in the AIS suite addresses specific integration needs, from workflow management with Azure Logic Apps to secure API exposure with Azure API Management and event routing with Azure Event Grid. In addition, we have shown how these services can be practically implemented in an integration platform architecture and supplemented with other services to address different aspects such as CI/CD deployment management, network configuration, and sensitive information storage management. By combining these services wisely, companies can create robust, scalable integration platforms that can meet the growing demands for connectivity and automation in an ever-changing cloud environment. In short, the Azure Integration Services suite provides a comprehensive set of tools to meet the challenges of cloud integration, paving the way for successful digital transformation and continuous innovation.

In the rest of this series, we’ll look at implementing a CI/CD strategy to create a resilient and scalable platform that can respond to changing needs throughout its life.

Interested in learning more about developing a modern integration platform? Read the other posts in this series:

• Why Develop a Modern Integration Platform?
• Why Use Azure Integration Services?