Chapter 13. Hybrid Integration Using BizTalk Server 2016 and Logic Apps

	The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.
	--Helen Keller

This chapter introduces the concept of Hybrid Integration and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016, new capabilities toward cloud integration. It explains how we can create a bridge between an application running locally and cloud-hosted services, by taking the advantage of Logic Apps- and BizTalk Server-extensive integration capabilities.

This chapter discusses the following topics:

• The introduction to Hybrid Integration

• Why Hybrid Integration?

• Message Exchange Pattern

• What is BizTalk Server 2016

• Build demo from Logic App to BizTalk Server

• Demo from BizTalk Server to Logic Apps

Hybrid Integration

For many years, organizations have made huge expenditure to build custom applications and infrastructure running on premise. Most of this custom-built applications hold major portion of business-centric data. With shift toward cloud and global market, businesses are required to share the data in one or another form to the customers and the partners in a secure manner. The business is also making huge investments in cloud offerings looking at the benefits, such as auto-scaling, pay-as-you-use, multiple SaaS products, and PaaS offerings.

The challenges these organizations are facing is to bridge on-premise resources sitting behind a corporate firewall with the cloud. To solve this mission-critical issue, the term Hybrid Integration has gained popularity in recent times. In a hybrid cloud infrastructure approach, customers use cloud to deploy servers and platforms within an extended network connected to their local domain. Hybrid solutions span over cloud (public, private...

Why Hybrid Integration?

Data is more important than ever; organizations are heavily relying on the data for future innovation and expansion in the current market. In the journey of digital transformation, applications are spanned over cloud and on premises. Hybrid Integration provides a layer of abstraction between resources sitting on premise and the cloud.

Hybrid Integration provides a business opportunity to reach wider audience by leveraging the latest offerings whether it is within the organization firewall or in the cloud.

We will discuss some of the benefits of Hybrid Integration in the coming sections.

Maximize use of past/existing investment

Most of the business houses have invested in huge to build custom enterprise applications and store data relevant for their business. For industries, data is a key enabler for their future innovation, and in most cases, data resides within legacy system sitting on premise. With the advent of competitive market, business houses are taking advantage...

Message exchange pattern

The Message Exchange Pattern (MEP) is an architecture design, which describes how two or more parties will connect and exchange messages amongst themselves. Understanding different MEP options is crucial to create correct architecture design for the Hybrid Integration solution.

There are three MEPs.

Datagram or one-way pattern

Datagram MEP uses one-way messaging pattern with fire and forget rule. In Datagram MEP, the message is sent with unidirectional and asynchronously without waiting for reply from the receiver. The number of message recipients can be single (point-to-point), a list of recipients (multicast), or a broadcast with a publish-subscribe mechanism:

Datagram or one-way messaging communication is a powerful way to build more event-driven applications and take advantage of non-blocking service invocation patterns.

One-way messaging pattern is a fundamental concept, which can be extended within other transport protocol. It has multiple benefits that can be...

What is a BizTalk Server?

BizTalk Server is a Microsoft central platform for on-premise and Hybrid Integration. For a number of years, it has served as a mainstream integration platform for worldwide customers, and the latest BizTalk Server 2016 is the 10th release of the product. BizTalk Server uses adapter technology to connect disparate systems and enable message exchange between systems.

With BizTalk 2016, Microsoft has built a Logic App Adapter, which connects on-premise BizTalk Server with cloud-based Logic Apps integration workflow. This has eased the process to share the integration resources between both integration offerings (BizTalk Server and Logic Apps), such as connectors and schema. For example, now you can use a Dropbox connector or cognitive services connector within BizTalk Server using Logic Apps. We will discuss Logic App Adapter in detail in coming sections and will show how easily we can create a connection with Logic Apps and BizTalk Server and use power of both integration...

Connecting on-premise BizTalk Server 2016 with Azure Logic App

In this sample, we will use our  fictitious  company Sunny Electricals to do cognitive analysis done for a product based on the customer response once an item is sold, replaced, or serviced. We will be using the WCF-SQL adapter to poll the on-premise SQL server and get customer feedback data available for Logic App to perform cognitive analysis.

This solution requires the following components to be installed and configured along with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016:

• The Logic Apps Adapter

• The WCF-SQL adapter

Step 1 - Creating Logic Apps for cognitive services

Azure Logic Apps provide cognitive services connector to be used in Logic App workflow. In the solution, we will show how to use Logic App that does sentiment analysis on sales data sitting on-premise. To perform sentiment analysis, we will use the Text Analytics API from cognitive services. To do this, in the Azure portal, you need to create cognitive services account:

Once...

Connecting Azure Logic App with on-premise BizTalk Server 2016

In this code sample, we will call on-premise WCF Service from Logic Apps through BizTalk Server 2016. Here, WCF Service is responsible for getting account details for a specific Sunny Electricals customer. We will use Consume WCF Service Wizard to generate XSD schemas for the WCF Service and generate an IIS endpoint for Logic App to trigger.

This solution requires the following components to be installed and configured along with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016:

• On-premise data gateway

• IIS configuration for Logic App Adapter

• WCF-Basic HTTP adapter

• Logic Apps Adapter

We have already discussed in Chapter 8, A Deep Dive into Logic Apps, how to install and configure an on-premise data gateway using your Azure subscription. We will use the on-premise data gateway along with BizTalk Server and Logic App Adapter to make the hybrid solution.

IIS configuration for Logic App Adapter

We assume that you have already installed and configured an...

Summary

In this chapter, we explored the capabilities of Logic Apps and how they can be applied to typical Hybrid Integration  scenarios using Logic App Adapter.

Logic Apps provide connectivity in on-premise applications.  We showed how we can connect the on-premise BizTalk Server and wide variety of services, such as SQL and WCF services hosted within corporate network, with no access to cloud.

In the next chapter, we will discuss tooling and monitoring, which can be used within Logic Apps to monitor the cloud integration platform.