UK Connected Systems User Group – BizTalk Services questions

This Wednesday I’m attending the CSUG – The Hybrid Organisation (sold out!). During my evaluation of several Integration products (BizTalk / BizTalk Services / Neuron ESB / MuleESB) I had some concerns/questions on BizTalk Services.

My goal is to get answers on the following scenario

  • a) I receive a HTTP Post with an Xml Body payload
  • b) This contains a signature which i need to validate
  • c) Transform the Xml body payload to another Xml message
  • d) Perform a HTTP Post with the new Xml message to an external HTTP url and sign the message
  • e) Route the response back, similar to the aforementioned steps, where an error needs to be mapped to a dedicated error response

Challenges

I'm wondering how to cope with some of the following challenges in this scenario, and would like to know resource information available which addresses some of these challenges;

Validating / Signing of messages

A requirement is to validate the incoming message by inspecting an signature in the message body, and signing the outgoing message. I now that a

custom inspector would help, however, i have no idea where to store these private certificates as these would be used inside the BizTalk Service (in the BizTalk Services portal I can only store public certificates).

Q: Is this functionality possible within BizTalk Services?

Handling errors when connecting to an Endpoint using BizTalk Services.

Detect an error and if one occurs, execute a mapping to return a custom Error message to the client.

Q: Is this possible by using a OnEnterInspector in the Enrich stage? (overruling the response by setting custom headers or something which triggers an different mapping than the happy flow)?

In case of a protocol error, i would like to be able to perform a retry

Send a POST request Using the HTTP protocol, handle technical errors gracefully by doing a retry. This means that the response for an endpoint needs to be evaluated,

Q: should this be implemented using custom bindings/behaviors for the endpoint, or will this be added as a feature in the future?

When communicating with the backend, what approach would be wise for managing certificates

My requirement is to place a call to an endpoint using TLS, this would mean i need to manage the certificate for the endpoint after the bridge. At this point, i'm only aware configuring a certificate to communicate with the bridge.

Q: Would this be possible by custom WCF behaviors?

Custom components

As a reference i have found this blog on using inspects, which helps with some of my questions (http://blog.codit.eu/post/2013/06/03/wabs-part3.aspx)

Note: At the moment I'm using BizTalk, however, i am working on a platform and would like to migrate to BizTalk Services as soon as possible. Any insight in the roadmap would help a lot.

Migration path

For now, we are evaluating BizTalk and would like to migrate to BizTalk Services at a later stage. For now, this would mean that we need to purchase a license and again purchase a subscription when we migrate.

Q: Are there any intermediate licensing options where we can use BizTalk for a certain period with the migration to BizTalk services in mind (e.g. 1 year license model + subscription).

Pricing

At this moment the costs of BizTalk Services are discounted with 50%, that quite a lot and could make/brake a use case cost-wise, depending on when BizTalk Services is out of preview.

Q: Is there any way to provide use BizTalk Services with a transaction based subscription, where we pay for the amount of transaction done through BizTalk Services?

 

 

Hopefully, more answers at the end of this week!

 

Regards,

Sander

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Azure implementation guidelines

In My post ‘ Service Bus Management ’ I pointed out a way of implementing a DTAP strategy for managing the Service Bus environment. There’s now a great post available from Microsoft which goes into more detail about other aspects of managing the Azure subscriptions and other artefacts which is quite useful when setting up your Azure environments. Follow this link to the ‘Azure Implementation Guidelines’ HTH, Sander
Read more

Focus and innovation - recap of the last 2 years

It's been a long time since my last post. Hereby a partial explanation for that, with the note that this blog will remain active for the purpose of being a resource for historical references. My IT career started with programming, and adventures within holland, as well as overseas. When I realised programming is something you can specify, I figured that providing added value is crucial for a long term career and decided to focus on process centric roles. I started with webservice integration and eventually from that to process integration using BizTalk. The great feeling when discussing high level processes and implementing solutions within days, even highly scalable and interfacing with LOB systems is great. After several years of implementing solutions like these, I started questioning if all of this work was justified by the business case, if the solution was actually contributing, if the choices had been valid. In other words, I needed to understand the choices made. When...
Read more

BizTalk Pub/sub vs Topics based routing–discussion

My colleagues and I had a brief discussion about the subject ‘Topics’ and what it brings… Do you all agree/disagree with the following statement: topic-based pub-sub messaging doesn’t really exist in BizTalk “In my opinion; I disagree, as BizTalk offers the following 'out-of-the-box' • Message Routing (f.e build in context properties like message type, trading partner, operation etc) • Content Routing (f.e. promoted properties, message inspection in orchestrations/pipelines icw orchestration logic)” My colleague Rene Brauwers Here my 2 cents…. I agree that it exists...however the current offerings in BizTalk are tightly coupled, making the usage far from perfect. When doing content based routing on custom fields (promoted properties), you will be making the solution message-coupled; Your custom message property schema is deployed, and the message filter on these fields have a direct relationship with this property schema. Making any change to this schema will g...
Read more