10 reasons why you should choose Azure Integration Services for your company

Components of Azure Integration Services

Taking into account Azure’s consumption-based cost model, the above-mentioned services achieve a standard of integration that is both well-organised and economical. Looking at each service in more detail will reveal how they collaborate with each other in addition to their individual merits.

Azure API Management

Today, most applications operate by exposing their features through APIs. Thus, by leveraging multiple APIs across different applications, organisations can execute complete business processes digitally. But managing APIs is no easy task; some concerns may arise while employing them in practice.

Azure API Management considerations: 

• Limiting requests: exposing APIs doesn’t mean that the application can process infinite requests from clients. Thus, setting a threshold on requests prevents applications from being overwhelmed.
• Speed and security: systems must rely on caching to ensure APIs respond swiftly to requests. But increased speed does not mean that security should be compromised. Considering that most applications are hosted on the public cloud, extra care must be placed on the authentication of calls to APIs.
• Documentation: to help developers run APIs smoothly, appropriate documentation must be available to outline its functionalities.

Azure API Management makes it possible to tackle these concerns. API Management implements a facade pattern that works to hide the complex internal logic of backend systems from users (typically application developers) in order to simplify their interactions with the API. Furthermore, it dictates how each API should respond in different situations. This includes caller authentication, blocking calls from specific sources, toggling data caching, converting data formats, and so on.

API publishers use the Azure Portal API Management extension to expose APIs to users, who in turn, request access to them via the Developer Portal. The Developer Portal also has information that aids users in their understanding of the API’s parameters and operations.

Azure Logic Apps

Azure Logic Apps is a workflow orchestration tool that allows the realisation of a business process. Let’s say an organisation has a process that requires an interchange of data with the CRM before it makes some changes to an on-premises database. Instead of depending on programming languages to construct the logic behind these steps from scratch, the organisation can consider implementing Logic Apps. Through its provision of out-of-the-box connectors and workflows that can help automate business processes, Logic Apps ensures seamless and scalable integration results.

Azure Logic Apps components:

• Workflow: a sequence of steps, each signifying a certain action or operation that must be executed to automate a total business process.
• Connectors: built-in actions or operations that can be utilised as steps in your workflows. Connectors facilitate working with data and other services.
• Triggers: these initiate Logic App workflows upon the arrival of an event or data that meets a predefined condition.
• Actions: these are steps that execute upon a trigger.

Logic Apps functions at the core of Azure’s iPaaS technology, easing the ability to connect to other software and services and computerise everyday business processes.

Azure Service Bus 

The Azure Service Bus is a way to incorporate asynchronous communication between applications. It enables applications to pass messages through queues; this means that even when applications are not running simultaneously, they can still interact with each other. It follows a publish-subscribe model that gives subscribers the advantage of being selective about the messages that are sent to a particular topic. For example, an application that handles food delivery orders for a restaurant can filter messages based on its proximity to the drop-off point.

Azure Service Bus features:

• Deletes duplicate messages.
• Handles problematic messages.
• Disaster management and recovery of messages.
• Atomic transactions for queue read-write operations.

Azure Event Grid 

Azure Event Grid offers another alternative to polling message queues for communication between applications. It paves the way for the usage of event-driven architectures that relay system changes through events. This means that developers can focus on coding their applications rather than worry about the underlying infrastructure. Events can be sent to particular endpoints or broadcast to multiple endpoints at once (assisting large-scale event delivery).

Azure Event Grid features:

• Events are lightweight and eliminate the need for polling.
• Highly scalable, with the power to handle 10,000,000 events per second within a single Azure region.
• Real-time engagement, with approximately 99% of events delivered in under a second.

Azure Functions

Azure Functions introduces serverless compute capabilities into an organisation’s  IT landscape. This means that developers can direct their attention towards writing code rather than worry about infrastructural elements such as virtual machines—these aspects are handled by Azure Functions instead.

Azure Functions features:

• Automated scaling removes the burden of infrastructure management from the user’s shoulders.
• Supports multiple programming languages including C#, Java, and Python, thus broadening the user’s options.
• Using small amounts of code to represent big architectures.