Sweden UG Visit Wrap Up

Last week I had the privilege of speaking at the BizTalk User Group Sweden.  Stockholm pretty much matched all my assumptions: clean, beautiful and full of an embarrassingly high percentage of good looking people.  As you can imagine, I hated every minute of it.

While there, I first did a presentation for Logica on the topic of cloud computing.  My second presentation was for the User Group and was entitled BizTalk, SOA, and Leveraging the Cloud.  In it, I took the first half to cover tips and demonstrations for using BizTalk in a service-oriented way.  We looked at how to do contract-first development, asynchronous callbacks using the WCF wsdualHttpBinding, and using messaging itineraries in the ESB Toolkit.

During the second half the User Group presentation, I looked at how to take service oriented patterns and apply them to BizTalk integration with the cloud.  I showed how BizTalk can consume cloud services through the Azure .NET Service Bus and how BizTalk could expose its own endpoints through the Azure .NET Service Bus.  I then showed off a demo that I spent a couple months putting together which showed how BizTalk could orchestrate cloud services.  The final solution looked like this:

What I have here is (a) a POX web service written in Python hosted in the Google App Engine, (b) a Force.com application with a custom web service defined and exposed, (c) a BizTalk Server which orchestrates calls to Google, Force.com and an internal system and aggregates a single “customer” object, (d) an endpoint hosted in the .NET Service Bus which exposes my ESB to the cloud and (e) a custom web application hosted in an Amazon.com EC2 instance which requests a specific “customer” through the .NET Service Bus to BizTalk Server.  Shockingly, this all works pretty well.  It’s neat to see so many independent components woven together to solve a common goal.

I’m debating whether or not to do a short blog series showing how I built each component of this cloud orchestration solution.  We’ll see.

The user group presentation should be up on Channel 9 in a couple weeks if you care to take a look.  If you get the chance to visit this user group as an attendee or speaker, don’t hesitate to do so.  Mikael and company are a great bunch of people and there’s probably no higher quality concentration of BizTalk folks in the world.