Heterogeneous Cloud Integration

Heterogeneous integration is common scenario in the Enterprises where their IT portfolio is based on heterogeneous platforms. Various solution approaches such as message broker, messaging middleware, SOA – service based integration were employed to address heterogeneous integration challenges.

 

These solution approaches were good when the integration happens on premise, with in the data centers of an Enterprise. Problem here is non-availability of “elasticity”.

 

With the Enterprises started leveraging cloud platforms extensively for various solution aspects such as elastic computing, storage, it opens new capabilities that can be leveraged for heterogeneous integration. Also, similar to existing on premise scenario, Enterprises are also leveraging multiple cloud platforms to address their business needs. This scenario will pose same integration challenges as those that were faced within on premise datacenters

 

Within datacenters / on premise, integration products were expected to comply with WS-* standards to avoid interoperable issues in heterogeneous integrations.

 

AMQP [Advanced Message Queuing Protocol] is a new standard protocol approved by OASIS for messaging solutions. This helps in building heterogeneous integration solutions in the context of (Heterogeneous) cloud. It can be leveraged for complete heterogeneous cloud based integration solutions & hybrid (Cloud + Datacenter – On Premise)

 

Windows Azure provides a capability “Service Bus” for enabling message exchange based integrations. With the support for AMQP 1.0 and availability of APIs in different platforms (Java / .Net), applications on different on premise / cloud platforms can leverage message exchanges based integration through Windows Azure Service Bus using AMQP 1.0.

 

This can help Enterprises to realize their BYOD plans based on devices from various platforms. Enterprise Apps can always leverage queuing & publish/subscribe brokered messaging features of Azure Service Bus as a middleware broker while the devices act as subscribers.