Overview of Azure Integration Services

30 December 2022 at 10:00 by ParTech Media - Post a comment

Are you looking to integrate your on-premises cloud-based applications with data and devices?

Are you looking to create reliable, scalable, and secure integration solutions that can not only connect your systems but also enable seamless data and process flow between them?

If your answer is YES to both the above questions, then your search ends with Azure Integration Services.

Azure Integration Services is your one-stop solution to integrate your business applications and automate your business processes.

In this post, we will understand in detail the different components of Azure Integration Services and how they are quite handy in creating powerful integration solutions.

Table of Contents

  1. What is Azure Integration Services?
  2. What are the different components of Azure Integration Services?
  3. Conclusion

What is Azure Integration Services?

Azure Integration Services is an iPaaS offering from the house of Microsoft. It helps Azure customers by offering a 100% serverless compute experience with the aim of driving efficiency while connecting multiple applications.

The best part about Azure Integration Services is that you can pick any capabilities you need, and you will be billed based on your consumption. With the help of Azure Integration Services, developers can build integration workflows, use pre-built connections, manage APIs, and connect to on-premises systems. It is highly cost-effective, flexible, and secure.

What are the different components of Azure Integration Services?

There are 4 main components in Azure Integration Services -

1. Logic Apps

In layman’s terms, Logic Apps are the tech that helps in moving your data across integrated systems. They intuitively perform logic on the transferred data by matching and mapping the fields of the two systems. This way, it ensures that all the systems have a very similar understanding of the data. Logic Apps also ensure that no custom code is written inside any of the applications.

You can simply use a visual designer to create the workflow of the Logic Apps with the help of connectors. They provide direct access to a wide array of services and triggers. This is in addition to the actions and transformations that can be used to build the workflow of the Logic Apps.

Logic Apps can connect to -

  • Azure Services
  • On-premises applications like Oracle, SAP, SQL Server
  • SaaS solutions like SalesForce, ServiceNow, and Office 365

2. Service Bus

Azure Service Bus is the next main component in the Azure Integration Services, and it helps control the flow of data. When Logic Apps are moving data from one system to another, Service Bus helps by queueing the information that needs to be processed. This is important, especially when the load is high and the application is struggling to process the volume. It is also quite useful when there is a downtime in one of the systems, and the information has to be held in a queue till the system is ready to receive the information. Long story short, Service Bus helps in building asynchronous and loosely coupled systems that are not only scalable but highly resilient.

Now you might wonder what is the big difference between Service Bus and Storage Queues, another fully managed message queue service.

The storage queues offer a simple REST-based GET/PUT/PEEK interface. Through this, it offers reliable messaging between services. But Service Bus takes it one notch higher by:

  • Supporting Publish and Subscribe
  • Offering advanced integration patterns
  • Providing options for multiple communication protocols and network environments.

3. Event Grid

Event Grid is an event routing service that lets you set up rules to route events from different Azure services to other services in your architecture. Think of it as a piece of technology to direct events to the right place, thereby simplifying a highly complex process. It is the perfect solution to deliver multiple small events to a large set of recipients reliably. When you club it with Logic Apps, you will be able to process any data without writing a single line of code. Event Grid is also used to notify whenever a specific event happens.

With Azure Event Grid, you can also -

  • Route events to other third-party services such as Slack, Service Bus, and Azure Stream Analytics
  • Target specific events/event data through event filtering
  • Ensure reliable delivery of events via in-built retry logic

4. API Management

API Management provides a centralized option to control your catalog of APIs. This helps in accessing the backend systems, primarily to -

  • Drive integration
  • Enable and connect internal systems, partners, and businesses.

API Management was created mainly to reduce the complexity involved while integrating multiple applications. API management also offers analytics to track usage and check the health of your operations from time to time. Being a single source of truth for all your business data, API Management is instrumental in saving the time of your employees without compromising the accuracy of relayed information.

API Management also offers advanced security thanks to the selective exposure of data and services. It also offers authentication, cache responses, authorization, and fine-grain quotas and limits.

Conclusion

In summary, Azure Integration Services is a robust platform that helps you in connecting various systems and applications. Through its wide range of tools (such as Azure Logic Apps, Azure Event Grid…), it helps in automating most of the processes and designing event-driven architectures. This way, the efficiency of your business improves while reducing the cost of operation at the same time.

Latest