Reflections on Integration 2014 (aka BizTalk Summit)

I’ve just returned from Integrate 2014, the annual gathering of BizTalk developers in Redmond. The big story this year was that Microsoft’s BizTalk team gave its first public briefings and demonstrations of the new BizTalk architecture it’s been planning for several years. The key features of this new architecture are:

• BizTalk Server will be refactored and re-implemented as small pluggable components. Each component can be used separately from the others, and new ones can be written by third parties and developers. They can each be developed and versioned separately, so there will no longer be single monolithic releases of “BizTalk Server”. I was reminded of how Microsoft has been breaking up ASP.NET into components with OWIN and Katana.
• But unlike OWIN, the new BizTalk components will not connect directly to each other. Instead their inputs and outputs will all pass through a new type of runtime engine that acts as a message broker. The message flow will thus be pub/sub rather than a pipeline.
• There will a web-based “gallery” where developers and business users can pick and choose components and arrange them into workflows. Developers will also have access to components in Visual Studio via Nuget.
• This architecture will be implemented first on Windows Azure, but will also run on-premise in a future version of the Windows Azure Pack. The latter appeared to be how the Microsoft devs were running their demos.

At the conference Microsoft referred to the new components as “microservices”. This term didn’t seem to appeal to everyone, and I won’t be surprised if Microsoft comes up with new terminology. (They no longer refer to it as “AppFabric” as they did in 2010.) And although the BizTalk team is moving the technology forward, we learned from Scott Guthrie (who gave the keynote) and Bill Staples (Director of Program Management for the Azure Application Platform) that Microsoft is planning to adopt this architecture for other Azure features and services.

Microsoft did not have a public preview of the microservice architecture to announce at the conference, but they promised it for 2015 Q1. That is also when they plan to release the first preview of the BizTalk Server 2015, which should be a “major” release since it will come in an odd-numbered year.

Although GA for the new BizTalk architecture is probably more than a year off, the most exciting takeaway for me was the affirmation, both from Microsoft and the developers assembled from round the world, that BizTalk Server and Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services (MABS) are still strong, vital and more able than ever to handle demanding enterprise integration. Old customers are sticking with BizTalk, and new ones are adopting it all the time. At Bennett Adelson we will continue to keep BizTalk at the center of our Connected Systems practice.