Recently I added an article to the integration playbook which compares the different approaches used for Durability, Persistence and Retry across the various microsoft technologies such as BizTalk, Logic Apps, Event Grid, Event Hubs, Service Bus Messaging and Functions You can read more here - https://www.integration-playbook.io/docs/durable-messaging-on-the-microsoft-platform
I have just launched the Integration Playbook which I have had in mind for a few years but only recently got around to doing. The idea is a community resource aimed at Architects, CTO and Leads. The resource will provide information, guidance and insights around common architecture and integration topics and relate them to the Microsoft technology stack. Where do I use which technologyHow does Microsoft relate to this IT or architecture topicHow can integration architecture help me be successful with Microsoft technologiesWhat can I do with technology XHow does technology X compare to technology Y The above are the [...]
When you are working with API's and Logic Apps and there is lots of rows of data involved you will sometimes come up with the following problems: An API often pages the data once you go beyond a certain number of records When you want to insert lots of rows with a Logic App into SQL you will usually have a loop which iterates over a dataset and does inserts This takes a long time to execute There is a cost implication to your implementation when you pay for each action I recently had a scenario in this space and [...]
Recently I wrote an article which is on technet wiki about understanding the roles and areas covered when monitoring and managing serverless solutions on Azure. I then discussed the gaps which Serverless 360 can fill based on our recent real world experience. The article is on this link https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/52071.managing-azure-serverless-solutions-in-the-real-world-and-the-gap-filled-by-serverless360.aspx
In this article I would like to discuss a pattern I've implemented recently where we could improve the user experience in a web app through the use of Logic Apps and Signal-R. Lets imagine we have a scenario at Acme University. They have built a super Student Portal building using ASP.net and Azure. The home page for this app will require some authentication probably against Azure AD and once logged in the student will be presented with a home page which is likely to contain lots of widgets with information targeted at them specifically. Its imaginable that the home page [...]
Having worked a lot with Dynamics CRM/365 over the last few years I thought it would be interesting to discuss a common use case and some of the architecture patterns you may consider to implement the solution. Lets imagine a scenario where the business requirement is as follows: The user will be updating a customers record in Dynamics 365 When the user saves the change we need the change to be synchronised with the billing system Now at this point I am going to deliberately ignore flushing out these requirements too much. Any experiences integration person will now be thinking [...]
Recently I had a chat with a few people at a company about integration solutions and a question came up which I remember not having been asked in a while. "Will the business users be able to modify the solution after its live". Back in the day you used to get asked this quite often but I don't remember being asked this one for a while. I do know that the technology landscape has changed a lot since I last got asked this and after a very interesting discussion I thought id share my thinking of this space. Why would [...]
I was invited to talk at TechUG in Newcastle last week. TechUG is a pretty impressive user group, it is based in the UK and is a partnership of 8 IT Pro based user groups based in 8 cities in the UK. They run 2 events per year in each city and are very popular with a twitter following well north of 10k. Ive spoken at TechUG a number of times before and its nice to get the chance to talk to a mainly IT Pro community when Im used to talking to architects and developers at most conferences. Also [...]
One of the biggest challenges in integration projects over the years is how to manage the relationship between the implementation of your solution and the documentation describing the intention of the solution and how it works and how to look after it. We have been through paradigm shifts where projects were writing extensive documentation before a single line of code was written through to the more agile approaches with leaner documentation done in a just in time fashion. Regardless of these approaches the couple of common themes that still exist is: How do we relate the documentation to the implementation? [...]
I wanted to talk a little about the architecture I designed recently for a Dynamics CRM + Portal + Integration project. In the initial stages of the project a number of options were considered for a Portal (or group of portals) which would support staff, students and other users which would integrate with Dynamics CRM and other applications in the application estate. One of the challenges I could see coming up in the architecture was the level of coupling between the Portal and Dynamics CRM. Ive seen this a few times where an architecture has been designed where the portal [...]
