Azure Integration Services (iPaaS) Overview

Objective

I am working on azure integration project for couple of years, so I thought, I should share my knowledge. So, in this article, I will let you know the basic introduction of azure integration services which is also called iPaaS, and then in later article will go in deep one by one with practical.

Microsoft Azure provide following main azure integration services which you can use to integrate your applications with lots of really good features that iPaaS provides.

1. Azure API Management
2. Azure ServiceBus
3. Azure Logic Apps
4. Azure Functions

Let’s start with basic understanding of each service.

1. Azure API Management: Azure API Management (APIM) helps organizations publish APIs to external, partner, and internal developers to unlock the potential of their data and services. Nowadays, businesses are moving to digital transformation, so Azure API management has big role to provides the capability to ensure a successful API program by developer engagement, business insights, analytics, security, and protection. API Management gives lots of really good features and policies to your APIs that we will discuss in later API management specific article.
   
   One scenario shown in below picture
   
   
    
2. Azure Service Bus: Azure Service Bus is an enterprise message broker service. Azure Service Bus is used to decouple the applications and services from each other. In other words, Azure service bus stores the messages in the topic and queue until receiver application up. Secure messages transferred between different applications and services. A message is nothing but a container that contains the metadata and data, data can be any kind of information in following format such as JSON, XML, Apache Avro, Plain Text. Will discuss about in details later.
   
   Service Bus Queue
   
   
   Service Bus Topic
   
   
    
3. Azure Logic Apps:  Azure logic app is the cloud-based integration service which provide the platform to automate your business using workflow. The workflows that integrate your apps, data, services, and systems. Using this platform, you can develop a highly scalable integrated automated business solution for your enterprise and business-to-business (B2B) scenarios.

The following list describes just a few example tasks, business processes, and workloads that you can automate using the Azure Logic Apps service:

• Schedule and send email notifications using Office 365 when a specific event happens, for example, a new file is uploaded.
• Route and process customer orders across on-premises systems and cloud services.
• Move uploaded files from an SFTP or FTP server to Azure Storage.
• Monitor tweets, analyze the sentiment, and create alerts or tasks for items that need review.

There are following some key term in logic app while creating the workflow

Trigger

A trigger is always the entry point or first step in any workflow and specifies the condition for running any further steps in that workflow. For example, a trigger event might be getting new tweets or getting an email in your inbox.

Action

An action is each step in a workflow after the trigger. Every action runs some operation in a workflow.

Condition

Its logical condition based on your data.

In below image you can see how Twitter connecter is entry point which is called trigger and then logical step to find the sentiment is an action then contention check after this either sending the email or storing the data based on condition. 

1. Azure Function: Azure function most widely uses cloud based serverless service. Azure function provides you a serverless solution in which you do not need to maintain server or infrastructure, you just need to focus on your code. Azure function trigger a piece of code that gives you a response when any event happens. There are lots of in-built triggers azure function provides you to develop your solution i.e. Blob trigger, serviceBus trigger, eventHub trigger, cosmosDb trigger and many more. The main difference between function and logic app is, function is code based solution and logic app is workflow that provide the user interface.

In below image there is one scenario in which using the azure http function trigger which has the logic to store/and retrieve the data to/from cosmos db. Admin can send the data using post data and store into cosmosDb and user can retrieve the data from cosmos Db to call the azure function

 

There is one more service EventGrid which use for integration that I will explain in a separate article.

Thanks, hope this article will give you overview of Azure iPaaS services