BizTalk and Its Components

What is BizTalk

1. BizTalk Server, commonly known as BizTalk, is a Microsoft Enterprise Service Bus.
2. It is an Integration Server which connects to different heterogenous applications
3. BizTalk Server includes a range of technologies for combining different systems into effective business processes

History of BizTalk

BizTalk Architecture

BizTalk engine has mainly two parts:

Messaging part: This is responsible for communicating with range of other applications. This part uses different adapters to communicate with heterogenous systems.

Orchestration Part: This is used to creating and running graphically-defined processes.

BizTalk Artifacts

1. Orchestration: This is the presentaion layer of the Server. You can create the orchestration by opening a BizTalk Project in Viusal Studio and the right clicking and then adding new Item.
2. Mappings: This facilitates mapping of fields between two different schema.
3. Send Ports: Send Port is used to send transmit message from BizTalk Server. There are mainly two kinds of send ports: One -Way and Solicit-Response.
4. Receive Ports: ReceivePort is used to receive transmit message inti BizTalk Server. There are mainly two kinds of receive ports: One -Way and Request-Response.
5. Pipelines: Send and Receive pipelines. This facilitates sequence of messaging processing steps like encoding/decoding assembling/deassembling parsing or validation.
6. Adapters: Adapters are the components thru which BizTalk Serve communicates thru different heterogenous systems. Following are the main adapters

BizTalk Message Flow

Message flows in following steps

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Messgae flows in following steps

1. A typical life cycle for a message that originates from outside of the ESB and received thru receive port. Example of receive types can be via WCF webservice or via File Drop.
2. Message context properties are set thru a pipeline component, using values of component properties or metadata contained in the itinerary SOAP headers.
3. Then message is saved into messages box.
4. Message is picked by a subscriber based on ESB metadata context properties.
5. Subscriber can be: Intermediaries, such as orchestrations or Off-ramps provided with the guidance.
6. After that message is processed thru the subscriber (applying busines rule).
7. Message is transmitted outside the BizTalk server via send ports.

Biztalk in Azure Iaas & Paas

Azure also provides BizTalk Services as Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS) architecture,for developing integration solutions. 

Advantages of Pass model:

1) you focus completely on the application logic and leave all of the infrastructure management to Microsoft

2)No need to manage or patch virtual machines.

3)Microsoft ensures availability.

4)You control scale on-demand by simply requesting more or less capacity through the Azure portal.

Azure also provides BizTalk Server as Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS) architecture, which can be configured on Azure Virtual Machines.

You create virtual machines and configure them exactly like your on-premises environment,making it easier to run existing applications in the cloud with no code changes.

With IaaS, you are still responsible for configuring the virtual machines, managing the virtual machines (for example, installing software and OS patches), and architecting the application for high availability.

If you are looking at building new integration solutions that minimize your infrastructure management effort, use BizTalk Services. If you are looking to quickly migrate your existing BizTalk solutions or looking for an on-demand environment to develop and test BizTalk Server applications,use BizTalk Server on an Azure Virtual Machine.

Further Reading

To know more about BizTalk (Services and Server) please go to following links.