Beginning of this month during the TechEd North America a new Windows Azure Service was released in preview mode: BizTalk Services. This service enables developers to create an integration solution on-premise and host it in this Windows Azure service. BizTalk Services were previously available as a Beta through the Windows Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI labs. The capabilities offered in these so-called labs:
- extend on-premises applications to the cloud,
- provide rich messaging endpoints on the cloud to process and transform messages,
- and help organizations integrate with disparate applications, both on cloud and on-premises.
All these capabilities are still present within BizTalk Services and have even been enhanced. A developer has a richer toolbox at its disposal. He/she use more destinations to send messages to like Service Bus Topic, Queue, SFTP and Azure Blobs. In case a developer has invested time to learn to previous Windows Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI labs than he can leverage this skill set for the current BizTalk Services.
A developer can build a hybrid solution by connecting on-premise LOB systems with any kind of HTTP, FTP, SFTP or REST data sources. Besides hybrid solutions the BizTalk Services can be used for EDI-processing in Windows Azure and EAI in the Cloud. The service can be managed and monitored through the Windows Azure Portal.
Through the Windows Azure Portal the BizTalk Service can be managed.
Within the Windows Azure portal the BizTalk Services can be monitored and scaled if required.
You can find more resources through the TechNet Wiki article by Sandro Pereira: Windows Azure BizTalk Services resources on the TechNet Wiki.
- Ninja Steef-Jan (Blog, Wiki, Twitter, Profile)