Connecting the colossal: How to scale innovation with serverless integration

Starting the process of migrating to the cloud can be daunting. Legacy systems that are colossal in scale often overwhelm the average team tasked with the mission of digital transformation. How can they possibly untangle years of legacy code to start this new digital transformation initiative? Not only are these systems colossal in scale, but also colossal in terms of business importance. Enterprise applications like SAP and IBM, are integral to the daily rhythm of business. A seemingly simple mistake can result in catastrophic consequence.

Over the past year, Azure Integration Services has been reflecting on solutions to help with these challenges and we’re excited to announce new capabilities:

• Developer focused – Improved the developer experience inside Logic Apps by allowing you to directly write code as a step inside a Logic App.
• Enterprise ready – Added new migration and modernization scenarios with the general availability of our new-and-improved SAP connector.
• Serverless first – Better integration between API Management and Azure Functions makes it even easier to create and manage serverless integrations and applications.

The challenges facing customers

Over the past year, we've had the opportunity to meet with and hear from customers in-person to discuss the biggest challenges facing their organizations, in terms of innovation. While the tools and technology customers use might be unique to their industry, the high-level challenges encountered are often universal.

Here’s a couple of the common high-level challenges :

• Developing, onboarding, and scaling new apps and services within existing IT infrastructure. Vipps, the number one payment service in Norway, faced these challenges while making the move from a monolithic application structure to a microservices first architecture.
• Migrating from on-premises legacy systems to the cloud without disrupting day-to-day operations. Alaska Airlines worked through this by adopting a hybrid approach.
• Rolling out digital transformation efforts throughout your organization and ensuring the success of these initiative. Finastra tackled this problem by leaning into an API-first solution and created a partner program that unlocked many different new opportunities for them.

These challenges are rooted in integration. By moving to the cloud and creating new, smaller cloud-native services, customers are realizing that the true benefit lies is in how everything works together. Integration is no longer about transforming and moving data from point A to point B, it’s now about how systems of apps, microservices, databases, and on-premises infrastructure are composed to achieve results.

Azure Integration Services leverages serverless technology to remove the resource overhead of managing infrastructure and instead, focus on connecting and composing systems that are adaptable to changing demands.

Looking ahead, our focus is on two key areas:

• Making the journey to the cloud as smooth and seamless as possible by improving the experience with our products, and how our products work together.
• Creating an out-of-the-box solution library that provides step-by-step guidance on when and how to use our Azure services to solve business and IT problems around connectivity, integration, and application development.

We know that to achieve in these areas, we must be at the forefront of the changing technology landscape. Integration is the backbone that drives application innovation and development, the journey to the cloud, and long-term success with cloud-native innovation strategies.

To learn more about Azure Integration Services, watch the Azure Friday episode giving an overview of Integration Services.

Interested in talking with an expert? Schedule a call with one of our solutions experts to see how Azure Integration Services can help you.

Source: Azure Blog Feed