A first look at Azure Integration Service Environments (ISE)

11th of March, 2019 / / No Comments

Introduction

Microsoft released its long awaited Integration Service Environments (ISE) Azure service in public preview. Time to have a sneak peak! Integration service environments consists of a dedicated environment to execute your integration workloads. This as opposed to the serverless compute paradigm that was used in traditional Logic Apps. Although the serverless model is great for many purposes, using an ISE can be best fit for purpose in some scenarios which I’ll further outline in this article.… [Keep reading] “A first look at Azure Integration Service Environments (ISE)”

Using Liquid transformations in Logic Apps… for free!

25th of February, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Microsoft offers a few different solutions to perform message transformations in Logic Apps. One of them I described before in ‘Translating JSON messages with Logic Apps’. Liquid is considered as the new way forward to translate JSON and XML messages. XSLT still has strong support if you’re working with XML documents but if you’re working with the JSON message format Liquid is your friend.

Liquid is an open source template language created by Shopify.… [Keep reading] “Using Liquid transformations in Logic Apps… for free!”

Asynchronous Logic Apps with Azure API Management

12th of December, 2018 / / No Comments

One of the many great features of Logic Apps is its support for long running asynchronous workflows through the ‘202 async’ pattern. Although not standardised in any official specification as far as I know, the ‘202 async’ pattern is commonly used to interact with APIs in an asynchronous way through polling. In summary, this pattern informs an API consumer that an API call is accepted (HTTP status 202) accompanied by a callback URL where the API consumer can regularly check for an actual response payload.… [Keep reading] “Asynchronous Logic Apps with Azure API Management”

Securing APIs through RBAC with Azure API management and Azure AD

26th of November, 2018 / / No Comments

One of Azure API Management great features is the ability to secure your APIs through policies, and thereby separating authorisation logic from your actual APIs. There’s plenty of guidance available on how to integrate Azure API management with Azure Active Directory or other OAuth providers, but very little information on how to apply fine grained access control on your APIs. Yes, it’s easy to setup OAuth to grant access to API consumers (authorisation grant) or machine to machine communication (client credentials grant).… [Keep reading] “Securing APIs through RBAC with Azure API management and Azure AD”

Building deployment pipelines for Azure Function proxies and Logic Apps

5th of November, 2018 / / No Comments

Azure Logic Apps offer a great set of tools to rapidly build APIs and leverage your existing assets through a variety of connectors. Whether in a more ad-hoc scenario or in a well-designed micro service architecture, it’s always a good way to introduce some form of decoupling through the mediator pattern. If you don’t have the budget for a full blown API Management rollout and your requirements don’t extend further than a basic proxy as a mediator, keep on reading.… [Keep reading] “Building deployment pipelines for Azure Function proxies and Logic Apps”

Translating JSON messages with Logic Apps

22nd of October, 2018 / / 2 Comments

One of the key components of an integration platform is message translation. The Microsoft Azure iPaaS Logic Apps service offers message translation with the out of the box ‘compose’ operation. Alternatively, message translation can be achieved with Liquid transforms. The latter requires an Azure Integration account which comes with additional cost. In this article we’ll look at the two transformation options and do a comparison in terms of cost, performance and usability. For my demo purposes I created two logic apps with HTTP input triggers and response output.… [Keep reading] “Translating JSON messages with Logic Apps”

Putting SQL to REST with Azure Data Factory

27th of June, 2017 / / No Comments

Microsoft’s integration stack has slowly matured over the past years, and we’re on the verge of finally breaking away from BizTalk Server, or are we? In this article I’m going to explore Azure Data Factory (ADF). Rather than showing the usual out of the box demo I’m going to demonstrate a real-world scenario that I recently encountered at one of Kloud’s customers.
ADF is a very easy to use and cost-effective solution for simple integration scenarios that can be best described as ETL in the ‘old world’.… [Keep reading] “Putting SQL to REST with Azure Data Factory”

Moving resources between Azure Resource Groups

24th of March, 2015 / / 16 Comments

The concept of resource groups has been around for a little while, and is adequately supported in the Azure preview portal. Resource groups are logical containers that allow you to group individual resources such as virtual machines, storage accounts, websites and databases so they can be managed together. They give a much clearer picture to what resources belong together, and can also give visibility into consumption/spending in a grouped matter.

However, when resources are created in the classic Azure portal (e.g.… [Keep reading] “Moving resources between Azure Resource Groups”

Command and control with Arduino, Windows Phone and Azure Mobile Services

24th of January, 2015 / / 1 Comment

In most of our posts on the topic of IoT to date we’ve focussed on how to send data emitted from sensors and devices to centralised platforms where we can further process and analyse this data. In this post we’re going to have a look at how we can reverse this model and control our ‘things’ remotely by utilising cloud services. I’m going to demonstrate how to remotely control a light emitting diode (LED) strip with a Windows Phone using Microsoft Azure Mobile Services.… [Keep reading] “Command and control with Arduino, Windows Phone and Azure Mobile Services”

Microsoft Windows IoT and the Intel Galileo

4th of December, 2014 / / 4 Comments

You might have seen one of these headlines a while back: ‘Microsoft Windows now running on Intel Galileo development board’, ‘Microsoft giving away free Windows 8.1 for IoT developers’. Now before we all get too excited, let’s have a closer look beyond these headlines and see what we’re actually getting!

Intel Galileo

With a zillion devices being connected to the Internet by the year 2020 a lot of hardware manufacturers want to have a piece of this big pie, and Intel got into the game by releasing two different development boards / processors: the Intel Galileo and more recently the Intel Edison.… [Keep reading] “Microsoft Windows IoT and the Intel Galileo”