InfoQ attended the recent Integrate 2016 event in London, where Microsoft Integration technologies took center stage. Day 1 focused on the BizTalk, Logic Apps and API Management teams. Day 2 was focused on Azure App Service adoption metrics and the new server-less Azure Functions. Microsoft's Cloud Messaging team also spoke about adoption metrics and their work in the Open OPC UA working group. In addition to Microsoft presenters, the event also included presentations by Microsoft MVPs who are industry experts identified by Microsoft.
Azure App Service
First up on Day 2 was Chris Anderson, a program manager, on the Azure App Service team. Chris started out his talk by giving an overview of the Azure App Service platform which focuses on developer services including Mobile Apps, Web Apps, and the new server-less app platform called Azure Functions.
Anderson shared some statistics on Azure App Service usage including:
- > 300K Active Customers
- > 900K Apps Hosted
- > 6 Billion Requests per Day
- > 200K Dedicated Cores
- 2x Yearly Customer Growth
- 4x Yearly Traffic Growth
Image Source: BizTalk360
Next in his presentation, Anderson demonstrated some use cases of the new Azure Functions service that was launched recently at Build. One use case included Azure Functions being called from Azure Logic Apps.
Since Azure Functions include an HTTP endpoint, another scenario in which they can be used, is an Azure Function being protected by Azure API Management. Using Swagger, APIs can be designed which therefore allows client proxies to be generated that enable the Azure Function to be called. Within the Azure Function a variety of languages can be used to implement your API, including:
- Java
- C#
- Node.js
- Python
- PHP
- Batch
- Bash
Azure Functions are priced based upon consumption, which provides customers with cost flexibility as their Azure Function usage increases.
Azure Cloud Messaging
Both Dan Rosanova, principal program manager, and Clemens Vasters, lead architect, from Azure’s cloud messaging team provided updates to their messaging platform and open initiatives they are involved in.
The first update came from Dan Rosanova on their Azure Premium Messaging service. InfoQ previously covered the public preview of this service in September 2015. The difference between premium messaging and the standard offering is with the premium service, customers get dedicated compute and isolation from other consumers of Service Bus. Premium messaging is sold in Messaging Units (MU) and a Service Bus Namespace can support up to 4 MUs by default. Additional MUs can be added through Microsoft support. Rosanova was able to provide some performance metrics of this service which includes the ability to process approximately 3000 messages per/second per MU.
In addition to Premium messaging metrics, Rosanova was able to share other consumption details of their messaging service, including:
- > 350 Billion Message operations on Azure Service Bus Messaging (Standard) per month
- 2 Million Message Queues and Topics in Production
- > 300 TB Daily Data Volume
- 1.5 GBps Ingress on a single small cluster
- 50 ms Average Event Hubs send latency
- 4, 494, 047 Requests per second to Azure Messaging
- > 60, 000 Daily Active Service Bus Namespaces
- 2.75 Trillion Events Received every month with Event Hubs
Image Source: Courtesy of Microsoft
To put these milestones into perspective, in September 2015 InfoQ covered Microsoft surpassing 1 Trillion transactions in a single month.
Other announcements provided by Rosanova include:
- Native Event Hub Java Client written on top of Proton-J that works with Docker, Access Control Service (ACS) and Docker Swarm.
- Azure Event Hub Dedicated Capacity to provide customers with large-scale, predicable throughput and large message size support.
Clemens Vasters provided some additional news in his talk including future support for Service Bus and Event Hub support on Azure Stack. Timelines and costs were not disclosed at this time, other than it will not occur in CY 2016 and that there will be some costs involved in using these platforms in Azure Stack.
Vasters also talked about his and Microsoft’s involvement in the OPC Foundation’s working group that is bringing in interoperability between industrial equipment/applications and Internet of Things connectivity. One of the key initiatives of this working group is to bring Publish-Subscribe messaging using the AMQP 1.0 protocol. AMQP 1.0 is an open messaging standard backed by many large organizations including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase Bank, Microsoft, Red Hat and Software AG. It is also the preferred protocol when interfacing with Microsoft’s Cloud Messaging platform.
Azure Cloud Messaging- 3rd Party Monitoring
In addition to the announcements that Microsoft made in the Cloud Messaging space on Day 2, BizTalk360, a Microsoft gold partner, announced a SaaS based Service Bus monitoring service. The service will be known as ServiceBus360 which will complement their flagship product BizTalk360. ServiceBus360 will provide governance, monitoring, alerting and analytics for customer Service Bus environments. Organizations interested in a preview of ServiceBus360 can register here.
Additional Coverage
Day 3 of Integrate 2016 included many sessions from Microsoft MVPs. You can find content about these sessions from the following blog posts:
