As cloud computing drives digital transformation, businesses are moving from on-premise solutions like BizTalk to agile, cloud-native platforms such as Azure Integration Services (AIS). This shift is more than a tech upgrade—it’s a strategic move to enhance scalability, streamline operations, and reduce infrastructure costs. In this article, we’ll explore why AIS is the smarter choice for modern businesses, highlighting its ability to simplify integrations, connect diverse systems seamlessly, and support long-term growth while providing practical insights to ensure a smooth migration.

The Growing Need for Cloud Integration

Today’s businesses are constantly growing and searching for new ways to allow them to grow. As everyone knows, extensive systems are not always based on some vast monolith architecture that stores all their business in one solution (Monolith architecture) and combines all data layers (MVC). Some systems collect and combine different types and structure subsystems, resulting in substantial integration systems. For integrating subsystems like CRM, APIS, and WPF working as one unit, Microsoft created Biztalk (since 2000) to allow developers to easily share data with different systems.

BizTalk has served as a reliable solution for businesses for over two decades. However, as companies grow and mature, so do the tools and systems that support them. Cloud computing has gained rapid momentum, bringing along an era where flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency are of the essence. This is where AIS becomes imperative.

Why It’s Time to Move On from BizTalk

Time is going by, and everything is changing, so it is time to say goodbye to BizTalk. Yes, after 20+ years of helping with integration in the Centric organization, it is time to move on. We are moving on to Cloud solutions, where the Cloud providers solve all infrastructure issues, and we don’t need to worry about SLAs or business-related things, such as physical servers.

But how do we integrate all our solutions to continue working as we worked with BizTalk? The good news is that Microsoft announced that AIS (Azure Integration Services) will incorporate solutions that connect applications and services on-premises and in the cloud.

AIS simplifies the integration process by removing complexities from managing physical servers, maintenance, and operational downtime. It shifts the complete focus towards business logic, hence enabling the organization to innovate faster and more effectively.

Migration: How Should You Do That?

Collecting business resources that are shared within the company is a challenge. However, with logic implementation, Microsoft created a migration document to help you collect nursery information, like mappings, connections, and services.

The BizTalk migration tool requires six steps to do before starting the migration to AIS:

• Discover: It pulls BizTalk Server resources and identifies the BizTalk artifacts to migrate. It also reads the assemblies and binding file information.
• Parse: It reads the BizTalk Server artifacts and builds a source data model for the application.
• Analyze: It builds an Azure Integration Services target data model using the source data model from the Parse stage. The tool reviews the BizTalk Server resources, identifies which items can migrate, and builds a data model of the Azure Integration Services target. 
• Report: It generates a report that outlines the BizTalk Server resources and the items that can be migrated. The report also contains detailed information about the contents of the source and target applications for any potential problems with the conversion.
• Convert: It generates Azure Manager Resource templates and Azure CLI scripts that you can use to build the applications in Azure by using the target data model.
• Verify: This phase isn’t currently built into the tool, but you run the installation scripts to deploy your application to Azure. You can assess whether the generated application provides the same functionality as your BizTalk server on-premises application.

When we collect all necessary business and integration information, we can create and organize AIS infrastructure.

How Did We Do It?

After the business investigation, we jumped to the infrastructure investigation for future integration solutions. Integration services stand on six main blocks:

• Azure Logic Apps
• Azure Functions
• Azure Data Factory
• Azure Service Bus
• Azure Event Grid
• Azure API Management.
  
  

Each of these blocks has its purpose and can help to solve your business issues. To choose the correct service that you need for your integrations, you need to understand their purpose of usage:

• Azure Logic Apps: They are designed to develop and run the logic app workflows to automate your application, data, services, and systems. On the pay-as-you-go model, they build scalable integration solutions on the cloud for an enterprise and business-to-business scenario. Use the visual workflow designer to enable microservices, API orchestrations, and line-of-business integrations. Run anywhere-Kubernetes-scale and portability along with automating business-critical workflows.
• Azure Functions: Works with less coding, less infrastructure to maintain, and fewer expenses to operate applications. The cloud infrastructure’s updated resources maintain all your applications without deploying and maintaining servers.
• Azure Data Factory: Integrate all your sources visually by taking advantage of more than 90 built-in, maintenance-free connectors at no extra cost. Build Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) and Extract, Load, and Transform (ELT) flows code-free in an intuitive environment, or write your code. Deliver your integrated data to Azure Synapse Analytics to unlock business insights.
• Azure Service Bus: An exceptionally reliable enterprise message broker for brokering messages between applications and services, including when either party is offline. Provide greater flexibility for client and server when you need to broker messages with structured first-in-first-out (FIFO) messaging, pub/sub capabilities, and asynchronous operations.
• Azure Event Grid: Integrate applications using events delivered by an event broker to subscriber destinations, such as Azure services, other applications, or any endpoint where Event Grid has network access. Different applications, SaaS services, and Azure services are potential event sources.
• API Management in Azure: Deploy API gateways side-by-side and optimize traffic flow with APIs hosted within Azure, other clouds, and on-premises. Meet all the security and compliance requirements while having a unified management experience and full observability across all internal and external APIs.

What Did We Choose and Why?

When we did an AIS (Azure Integration Services) analysis of services and our business needs, we decided to choose these services:

• API Management
• Azure Functions
• Services Bus.

We chose to use Azure Functions for these reasons:

1. From discussions and a big effort made by old business analyses. Regarding our complicated business rules, we chose to use Azure Functions for these reasons:

• We have a strong background in developing (strongly in CENTRIC, specialty C#, .netCore)
• We want to have flexibility in implementation
• Local development and debugging
• Possibility to write unit and integration tests.

2. We have two possibilities for communication between Functions: a Service bus or an Event grid. Regarding our data-sending needs, we would need Topics (to send Events to multiple subscribers) and Queues (to handle false tolerance of our integrations). For communication, we chose to use the Service bus.

3. Third parties (custom solutions will call us using REST APIs) need to be able to reach your services, so we need to expose them to the internet somehow. For that, we used API Management.

Ensuring Fault Tolerance

We used a traditional integration flow commonly taught in IT university fault tolerance courses to ensure proper integration between our services and prevent data loss. Our functions are based on HTTP triggers to handle incoming HTTP requests, so after receiving a request, we apply business logic to push data for further processing by other functions. We need a robust strategy to avoid losing or failing to process data.

We employ a robust strategy to avoid the risk of losing or failing to process data. Instead of handling the request directly, we push a command to the Service bus queue. This approach allows us to manage data reliably, ensuring that if we cannot process it immediately or we get a failure in business logic, we can retry later. Using the queue, we decouple the request handling from the business logic processing, enhancing fault tolerance and ensuring no data is lost during the integration process.

After data is pushed to the queue, we inform our client about the accepted request and return an HTTP 202 (accepted) response. As you can understand, after making a message to the queue, our message processing changes its behavior from synchronous to asynchronous. This approach enhances fault tolerance because if message handling fails, it will be retried ten times. If it continues to fail, the message will be moved to the dead-letter queue, a feature provided in Azure Service Bus.

Once the message is in the queue, a function can retrieve it using a Queue trigger and handle the request asynchronously. We can perform all necessary business logic and data processing at this stage. After completing and validating the business logic, we can push the created events to the topic, where subscribers can handle further processing.

In this workflow, we have two layers of data loss protection:

1. Pushing messages to the queue instead of handling them directly.
2. Handling topic messages, allowing retries in case of failure.

Key Takeaways

The migration journey from BizTalk to Azure Integration Services (AIS) is an important milestone for organizations wanting to maximize the benefits of cloud-native solutions. With unparalleled scalability, flexibility, and efficiency, AIS empowers organizations to simplify workflows, improve fault tolerance, and future-proof their integration strategies. By leveraging tools like Azure Functions, Service Bus, and API Management, businesses can reduce infrastructure overhead, focus on innovation, and stay agile in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. This migration is not just a technical upgrade but a strategic move toward achieving sustainable digital transformation and long-term growth.

Want to discuss this topic further or have questions about your business migration to cloud processes? Let’s talk!