Building an Azure based Integration Platform – Part 1

During this year I have worked with a company in Asia to design and develop an separate integration platform capabilities which will support their business and integration needs for the future.  I thought id share some stuff about the journey to give people some ideas about what you can do with integration on Azure.

We have a vision in mind about what the integration platform could look like but one of the key things is that we need a level of agility with our integration solutions so that we can develop them quickly and effectively and Azure should give us a platform to be able to do this.  The other key element to the initiative was that we wanted to build the integration platform as we went.  We knew it was not a good idea to build everything up front so we would add resources as we needed then.

With this in mind the below diagram gives an overall view of what the technology in the integration platform would look like.

With this vision in mind we knew we would have some tool available to implement many of the key integration capabilities we might need.

At first glance there is a lot of technology there and its about using the right tool for the right job.  In our case we felt that as a vision these tools would give us the things we were most likely to need but we also knew that we would be able to change tools if required as long as we designed the solutions we would use in a decoupled way.

In the rest of this series of posts I will talk about how the integration platform evolved and some of the design decisions we made along the way.