Upcoming Presentation: BizTalk Summit

 

BizTalk Summit 2015 -  April 13/14 London, England

The BizTalk Summit has become an annual, must attend, event in London.  This event is once again being organized by BizTalk360 in conjunction with Microsoft and the BizTalk Product group.  BizTalk360 has organized several large events and I expect this one to be even bigger than some of the other events they have hosted including the very successfully Integrate 2014 event they put on in Redmond in December 2014.

There have been over 250 attendees registered and you can still take advantage of some discounted tickets being available.  This event provides a great opportunity to learn and network with Integration experts from all over the world including Microsoft BizTalk and Service Bus product team members.  Please visit this link for registration information.

My buddy Sandro Pereira has put together a blog post called Top 7 reasons to attend BizTalk Summit 2015 which I thought was an interesting read.  You can take a look at that article here.

Recently, some of the BizTalk Summit session abstracts have been posted, including mine, so I thought I would update my blog as my the sessions were not public when I previously announced I would be speaking.

My topic is on API Management and more specifically Azure API Management.  You can read the details below.

Session Abstract

API Management Part 1 – An Introduction to Azure API Management

Building APIs is not just about technology. APIs enable many new business opportunities, but only if done correctly. As a result of lucrative opportunities, many Software vendors have emerged or pivoted from their SOA management roots to provide API Management capabilities. These API Management platforms provide the building blocks behind a successful API program.

In this session, Kent will introduce you to Microsoft’s Azure API Management platform by providing an overview that highlights its capabilities and the opportunities that emerge for organizations. As part of this presentation, Kent will demonstrate how developers can create their first API and discuss strategies for transforming existing services to leverage Azure API Management.

This presentation will consist of general guidance on API Management, an Azure API Management portal walk-through and demos that re-enforce the concepts that were introduced.

You may be asking yourself – “Part 1” well what is “Part 2”?  There will be another session that includes Azure API Management by Tomasso Groenendijk. We have been working together to ensure there is no overlap and he will pick up where I leave off from an Azure API Management capability perspective.  

BizTalk Summit 2015 – London

Last year I had the opportunity to participate in the BizTalk Summit in London.  It was a great event with more than 200 attendees from 20 different countries present.  For a recap of this trip please check out this blog post.

I was recently asked if I was interested in coming back to speak at this year’s event which I gladly accepted.

More details will be available in coming weeks but the agenda is shaping up to be excellent with sessions from the BizTalk Product group, other Microsoft employees and several Microsoft Integration MVPs. I think this event will be even bigger than the recent Integrate event in Redmond which was a big success.  If you are in Europe, you do not want to miss this event.

My session abstract has been put forward and should be up on the event website in the coming days so I don’t want to ruin that surprise, but you can expect it to be focused on Azure API Management and how it plays a role in a BizTalk developer’s toolset.

Integrate 2014 Summit

 

Recently Microsoft and BizTalk360 have announced the continuation of the Global BizTalk Summit that is held annually in the greater Seattle area.  This year the event moves from downtown Seattle to Redmond and has been branded Integrate 2014. The event will take place December 3rd – 5th, 2014 on the Microsoft campus.  If you are interested in Microsoft Integration technologies, this is a must attend event. 

Based upon the current Session Schedule you will be exposed to:

• New BizTalk Adapter Framework for BizTalk Services
• New Workflow designer in BizTalk Services
• New BizTalk Rules Engine in BizTalk Services
• B2B Improvements in BizTalk Services
• Internet of Things (Service Bus)
• Hybrid Connectivity
• Azure API Management
• Customer Success Stories
• Ask the Experts (MVP) interactions

As you can see there is a lot of unique and progressive content on display at this event.  I will be attending the event as will many other familiar faces from the Microsoft Integration community.

Registration is now open and there are some early bird tickets available until November 15th, 2014.

See you there!!!

BizTalk360 Product Specialist award

 

This post is long overdue but I felt it was necessary to create.  Back in April, 2013 Saravana Kumar and the BizTalk360 team introduced the BizTalk360 Product Specialist award.  The primary objective of the program is to honour individuals who have gained adequate knowledge in installing, configuring and implementing BizTalk360 solution at customer sites.

I have blogged( here, here and even wrote a whitepaper )  about some of my experiences with BizTalk360 in the past on this blog and am a strong supporter of the product.  I have seen the benefits first hand while leading teams who are responsible for the operational support of busy BizTalk environments.  I have also witnessed the adoption by non-BizTalk experts and seen their productivity increase without being intimidated by larger, complex monitoring solutions. 

Recently I introduced BizTalk to a new organization and this was a tool that would provide immediate benefit.  Sure enough it did, we had a source system experience issues that led to some suspended messages.  The BizTalk team knew about the issues going on in that system before the system owners did.  The end result was that the issues in the source system could be identified and resolved quickly, limiting the disruption to the business.

While I was in Norway, Saravana had a bit of a surprise for me and that was some hardware to keep my MVP awards company. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank Saravana and the rest of the BizTalk360 team for their recognition and I am looking forward to working with Version 7.0 of the product. I got a sneak peak of the application while in Norway and it looks great.

 

BizTalk360 - Monitoring Service High Availability Feature

 

I recently went through my second implementation of BizTalk360 and ran into a feature that I wasn’t previously aware of. Typically I have installed BizTalk360 on a BizTalk Server itself which posses a bit of a risk if you only install it on one BizTalk Server and that BizTalk Server happens to be offline. 

My current environment consists of a multi-node cluster (an actual cluster with Failover Cluster Services).  I recently asked the question to Saravana Kumar if this was the way to go when looking for a redundant monitoring solution.  He indicated that my idea would work and is completely supported however I may want to look into a new feature called Monitoring Service High Availability.  When using this feature, BizTalk360 itself is maintaining its state by storing it in the database.  In my case, One node will be active and the second node will be passive – much like a service being managed by Windows Failover clustering.

To access this feature click on the Settings link in the top right hand corner of the screen.

Next, click on the Monitoring Service High Availability link.

Even though the BizTalk360 Service is actively running on both Servers (in my case), BizTalk360 is designating one of the servers as being the primary.

We have the ability to change the primary server by selecting it and then clicking on the Bring Server Active button.

Instantly our primary will switch to becoming a secondary and vice-versa.  This was very quick.  Much quicker than I have experienced failing over a service using Windows Failover Clustering.

The next test is to take our primary Service (or Server Offline).  To do this I will just stop the BizTalk360 service.  By doing so I am simulating what would occur if our service stopped or we lost our entire primary server.  To make this test even more real I am going to enable a test alert, make sure I receive the first alert and then stop the BizTalk360 Service.  My expectation is that my second node will become primary and I should receive another test alert.  This time the alert will be generated from the newly activated node.

 

Below I have configured an existing alarm to function in  TEST MODE.

I have received my alert as expected.

I will now stop the BizTalk360 Service on Node 1.

If I navigate back to the Monitoring Services High Availability screen I find that my “Node 2” is now the active server and my “Node 1” is no longer participating as it is offline.

If I check my inbox, I find that I continue to receive these “TEST Alerts” from BizTalk360.  This time the alerts are coming from my 2nd Node.

If we now go back to my 1st Node and start the BizTalk360 Service, we will discover that BizTalk360 has recognized that the service is back online but is in a passive state.

Conclusion

I have been around Windows Fail-over Clustering for quite some time and am comfortable working within that environment.  The BizTalk environments that I have used in the past also tend to leverage Windows Failover Clustering in order to support Cluster Host Instances for adapters such as S/FTP, POP3 and Database Polling.  Using Windows Failover Clustering is an option for ensuring BizTalk 360 is online and redundant, but it is not a pre-requisite.  As I have demonstrated in this post; BizTalk360 provides this functionality out of the box.  This is great news, especially for those who have multi-node BizTalk environments but do not have (or need) Windows Failover Clustering.  This allows you piece of mind in the event one of your BizTalk Servers goes offline, that you can have BizTalk360 installed on another node your coverage will not be interrupted.  Kudos to the BizTalk360 team for building such an important feature and making it very easy to use!

BizTalk Monitoring Whitepaper is now available

For the past month and half, in my spare time, I have been working on a whitepaper that compares and contrasts System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and BizTalk360. 

I have used both products extensively in my professional life and in order to remain objective within the paper I have driven my evaluation off of requirements.  These requirements are based upon my experience of managing the 24x7 operations of a BizTalk environment at a large Power Distribution company in Canada.

The paper can be downloaded from here and feel free to leave any comments that you may have below.

I would also like to thank Steef-Jan Wiggers for being a technical reviewer on this paper.  He provided me with some valuable feedback that increased the quality of the paper.