My New Pluralsight Course – Patterns of Cloud Integration – Is Now Live

I’ve been hard at work on a new Pluralsight video course and it’s now live and available for viewing. This course, Patterns of Cloud Integration,  takes you through how application and data integration differ when adding cloud endpoints. The course highlights the 4 integration styles/patterns introduced in the excellent Enterprise Integration Patterns book and discusses the considerations, benefits, and challenges of using them with cloud systems. There are five core modules in the course:

• Integration in the Cloud. An overview of the new challenges of integrating with cloud systems as well as a summary of each of the four integration patterns that are covered in the rest of the course.
• Remote Procedure Call. Sometimes you need information or business logic stored in an independent system and RPC is still a valid way to get it. Doing this with a cloud system on one (or both!) ends can be a challenge and we cover the technologies and gotchas here.
• Asynchronous Messaging. Messaging is a fantastic way to do loosely coupled system architecture, but there are still a number of things to consider when doing this with the cloud.
• Shared Database. If every system has to be consistent at the same time, then using a shared database is the way to go. This can be a challenge at cloud scale, and we review some options.
• File Transfer. Good old-fashioned file transfers still make sense in many cases. Here I show a new crop of tools that make ETL easy to use!

Because “the cloud” consists of so many unique and interesting technologies, I was determined to not just focus on the products and services from any one vendor. So, I decided to show off a ton of different technologies including:

• Force.com
• ASP.NET / C#
• OData
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online
• Windows Azure Service Bus
• Windows Azure Web Sites
• Windows Azure SQL Database
• Windows Azure SQL Data Sync
• Windows Communication Foundation
• ASP.NET Web API
• BizTalk Server 2013
• Node.js
• Mulesoft and their CloudHub
• Cloud Foundry / Iron Foundry
• AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)
• AWS Relational Database Service (RDS)
• Informatica Cloud

Whew! This represents years of work as I’ve written about or spoken on this topic for a while. It was fun to collect all sorts of tidbits, talk to colleagues, and experiment with technologies in order to create a formal course on the topic. There’s a ton more to talk about besides just what’s in this 4 hour course, but I hope that it sparks discussion and helps us continue to get better at linking systems, regardless of their physical location.