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.
Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings 
On behaft of everyone at Swedish User Group, thanks for comming by. Hope to see you soon again.
//Mikael