BizTalk 2020 & Azure

In 2020 BizTalk is still able to support those traditional BizTalk use cases using only the out of the box BizTalk features which have been used successfully for years, but the ecosystem is much wider now and customers who are gaining the most success with Microsoft Integration technologies are now combining their BizTalk platform along side Azure Integration Services like in the below diagram.

In this pattern you have the best of both worlds. You have your reliable, mature and stable BizTalk environment which can continue doing what it does for many years but you are also able to combine it with services on Azure. I expect many customers combine their BizTalk with services like:

• Service Bus
• Logic Apps
• Functions
• API Management

These services will help you to open up new use cases for SaaS applications, use cases for event and cloud scale messaging and API based scenarios.

There will also be benefits around flexibility, scalability & cost reduction to move some use cases from BizTalk to Azure.

At this point Microsoft are encouraging BizTalk customers to move to Azure but their cloud PaaS offering does not yet offer full feature parity with BizTalk and BizTalk is also under support for a long time yet too. Most BizTalk customers have a few key questions:

1. Are you happy to continue investing in BizTalk for new interfaces?
2. Which interfaces are right to migrate to Azure now?
3. Which interfaces are worth moving to Azure?

I think the most positive thing about the current platform is that you can leverage the Azure Services for your new interface investments which may be completely new or you can extend the interfaces you already have in BizTalk and extend them to new scenarios using Azure. I think you can migrate to Azure at your own pace at the moment. You can choose the interfaces which offer the best benefits by moving to Azure.

I will talk about this some more in other articles in te future around BizTalk migration.