Welcome to the 29th interview of the series, today's expert is Toon Vanhoutte.
Toon
Vanhoutte, a Microsoft integration expert. For more than 10 years, he is
been involved in a high variety of large and medium-sized integration projects.
It all started with pure application integration with Microsoft BizTalk Server,
but rapidly other technologies got involved: SSIS, WCF, WF... he has
implemented many different types of integrations: EAI, B2B, SOA, ESB… Last
years, the focus has been mainly on the adoption of the rich Microsoft Azure
cloud platform: API Apps, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Service Fabric, API
Management, etc... Nowadays, integration is more and more moving towards hybrid
setups and fully cloud based solutions.
He started as a pure developer. By combining a deep technical know-how with good communication skills, he grew towards a more consultancy oriented role. After several years, it was a natural step to become development team lead. As he got more and more involved into architectural decision making and solution design, he is now taking up to role of Integration Solution Architect.
He is quite active member of the Microsoft integration community. He was a speaker on several community and company events. You can read some of his blog posts on the Codit Blog. He is also a Microsoft Certified Trainer, as he loves to share my experiences in training sessions or at workshops.
Throughout his career, he has gained a specific expertise and interest in:
• ALM: applying continuous integration principles (automated build, release and deployment)
• B2B: AS2 and AS4 messaging protocols (member of OASIS ebXML technical committee)
• SCRUM: product owner for several long-term projects (certified scrum master + product owner)
• Hybrid Integration: love to tackle challenges in this specific area
Let’s begin the interview…
He started as a pure developer. By combining a deep technical know-how with good communication skills, he grew towards a more consultancy oriented role. After several years, it was a natural step to become development team lead. As he got more and more involved into architectural decision making and solution design, he is now taking up to role of Integration Solution Architect.
He is quite active member of the Microsoft integration community. He was a speaker on several community and company events. You can read some of his blog posts on the Codit Blog. He is also a Microsoft Certified Trainer, as he loves to share my experiences in training sessions or at workshops.
Throughout his career, he has gained a specific expertise and interest in:
• ALM: applying continuous integration principles (automated build, release and deployment)
• B2B: AS2 and AS4 messaging protocols (member of OASIS ebXML technical committee)
• SCRUM: product owner for several long-term projects (certified scrum master + product owner)
• Hybrid Integration: love to tackle challenges in this specific area
Let’s begin the interview…
Mahesh: Who are you and what you do?
When did you start working on BizTalk?
Toon:
I'm Toon Vanhoutte, working as a Lead Architect for
Codit Belgium. I'm responsible for the technical vision and strategy
within the company, taking up a lot of technical pre-sales activities and
highly involved in solution architecture. Codit delivers projects in four
domains: Integration | API Management | Azure Solutions | Internet of
Things. During my master thesis, back in 2006, I got in contact with
BizTalk Server for the first time. Since 2007 I'm working professionally with
this amazing integration product.
Mahesh: How did you mastered BizTalk
(Learning path, amount of time)?
Toon: I
graduated as an industrial engineer, so I really had no IT education.
Thanks to some enormously helpful colleagues at my first job, I learned
everything step-by-step. You need to make sure you really understand the
basics: .NET Framework, XML, XSLT, SQL Server and common integration
patterns! Next to that, it's important to know how BizTalk works under
the hood, so you use it the right way! Pub-sub means leveraging the
BizTalk MessageBox and context properties, not using a decision shape within an
orchestration! Next to that, there are some great Pluralsight courses out
there and I would definitely recommend the book Professional
BizTalk Server 2006 by Darren Jefford, Kevin B. Smith & Ewan Fairweather,
once you understand the base principles. Learning on the job is still the
best way to master BizTalk Server, guided by someone who really knows the
product well!
Mahesh: Which are the major projects you
handled so far?
Toon: EESSI is
definitely the biggest project I worked on. It's the abbreviation of
Electronic Exchange of Social Security Information. It's an IT system,
designed to help social security institutions across the EU to exchange
information more rapidly and securely. Together with my team, we were
responsible to build the generic Access Point software on top of BizTalk
Server, that will be deployed in more than 50 places across 32 European member
states. BizTalk has a crucial role in the secure and reliable exchange of
message, using the AS4 protocol. Throughout the coming years, EESSI will
be gradually rolled out in production. A huge project, involving complex
project management, architecture and development.
Mahesh: What do you think is the most
challenging part while working on Integration project?
Toon:
Convincing the customer to have an integration mindset
and to decouple applications as much as possible. The benefits or such an
approach are mostly only visible after several years, which doesn't make it
easy to adopt such a vision from the beginning. Another challenge is to
point also to the responsibilities for backend applications, such as providing
idempotent endpoints. An integration layer can solve a lot, but not
everything. It's always a balancing exercise between integration best
practices and customer expectations.
Mahesh: How do you see BizTalk compare
to other integration platform?
Toon: I know
the base feature set of some of BizTalk's competitors, but not enough to make
an objective comparison. One of the big selling points of BizTalk Server
is that the product supports many open standards and that it is not build
around one specific application. It's an extremely extensible product,
which means you are not limited by the product boundaries. Nowadays, it's
important to mention the smooth integration with the Azure cloud platform,
which opens an enormous range of new opportunities. And last, but not
least: there's a big community around BizTalk Server, which should not be
underestimated! In several proof of concepts, we won against some
competitors, thanks to the fast value creation we achieved with BizTalk.
Mahesh: What as per you is must to know
to become an Integration (BizTalk) Expert?
Toon: I don't like
the term "expert", because based on the projects you've done
throughout your career, there are some areas of integration that you really
master and others that you just know until a certain level. You can't be
a specialist in everything. At Codit, with combined forces, we can call
ourselves integration experts, but not as a single individual. There are
three important things if you are working in integration: know your integration
product(s), know your integration patterns and have good communication skills!
Mahesh: What are your thoughts on
forums, blogs and articles etc.?
Toon: The value you get out of such community content is
incredible! Just google the exception message you encounter and you'll
probably find the solution on one of the forums out there. The enormous
amount of blogs and articles are really helpful if you're dealing with a new
challenge: probably someone else has already encountered similar challenges and
explained how he/she tackled the problem. You can always reach out to
active community members if you want to discuss a specific use case.
Mahesh: Your suggestion to a newcomers?
What should be approach to get sound knowledge in BizTalk?
Toon: First
of all, make sure you are accompanied by colleagues who really know how to use
BizTalk as it should. They will guide you on the job, which is the best
education you can imagine. Next to that, ensure you obtain a profound
understanding of .NET Framework, XML, XSLT, WCF, SQL Server and common
integration patterns! As a BizTalk developer, it's essential that you
don't only interact with systems, but also with the people that are in charge
of them. Communication and people skills are very important to find your
way in the integration space!
Mahesh: There are many tools from
community which support BizTalk in some or the other way(like BTDF, Bizunit
etc), what do you say about it? Which ones you would recommend? Why? No
Microsoft support available?
Toon: The
reason that these mature community tools have been developed, is because of
missing functionality in the core product. For years, these missing gaps
have been ignored, but recently they got some attention by introducing a
Uservoice page and releasing the BizTalk feature packs. The most popular
community tool is probably the BizTalk Deployment Framework, which is a very
solid solution to deploying BizTalk applications. The ALM story of
BizTalk is being improved through various feature packs, so maybe it will get
deprecated in the future. Since a couple of weeks, BizTalk has taken its
first steps in open sourcing some parts of the product. Hopefully, some
community products can be on-boarded via that channel!
Mahesh: What are your thoughts around
BizTalk certification?
Toon:
Obtaining a BizTalk certification, means you
understand the base principles of the product. However, it's not a
guarantee that you will be able to deliver quality integration solutions on top
of BizTalk Server. It's a pity to see that there is no active BizTalk or Microsoft
integration certification available at the moment. Let's hope this will
change in the near future.
Mahesh: What is the future of BizTalk?
Toon: BizTalk is here
to stay, more than ever before. It's has a very extensive customer base,
which can't be ignored. The commitment of Microsoft towards the product
has never been so big and clearly communicated. Thanks to its perfect
integration with Azure ServiceBus and Logic Apps, BizTalk is very well
positioned for hybrid scenarios, which is reality nowadays. Traditional
enterprises that have a BizTalk solution running on-premises, can now easily
benefit from the great cloud opportunities, without disrupting their running
businesses. This bring more agility and flexibility to their integration
platform!
Mahesh: Any thoughts on cloud?
Toon:
Any? Many! Hybrid integration is reality,
cloud integration is the future! With cloud integration, I don't mean a
lift and shift of BizTalk Server to Azure IaaS, but really leveraging Azure's
serverless integration platform. By combining Azure Logic Apps,
ServiceBus, Functions, Event Grid and many other Azure services, you can build
in no time extremely powerful integrations. It's important to enrich
these integrations with the right governance, appropriate security, end-to-end
monitoring and continuous delivery. It are exciting times to be in the
integration space right now, as all these Azure services are evolving rapidly.
Mahesh: What motivates you to do the
community work?
Toon:
During my first BizTalk years, I learned a lot from
the community content out there. Contributing nowadays, feels like giving
something back in return. When discovering new technologies, I love to go
that extra mile, because I know I will share my findings with the community
afterwards. As all the community content I produce remains publicly
available for a long time, I consider this as an extremely important part of my
CV. I have
also the impression that other community members and product teams are more
responsive, as they value your contributions to the community.
Mahesh: As per the Roadmap provided by
Microsoft, Logic Apps will be able to run on-premise in addition to AZURE. Do
you think Azure Stack Logic Apps on prem will supersede BizTalk Server?
Toon: I'm not
convinced that Logic Apps will make it any time soon to Azure Stack.
There was the announcement that App Services will become available on Azure
Stack, but Logic Apps is not part anymore of App Services, even though it was
originally released as a part of it. For on premise integration, I'm
convinced that BizTalk Server will remain Microsoft's key component, as it has
an extremely powerful integration with traditional line of business
systems. Logic Apps doesn't have yet such mature enterprise LOBC
connectors to connect to Oracle, SAP, IBM, MQSeries, as BizTalk / Host
Integration Server has.
Mahesh: From my perspective, Microsoft
keeps coming up with Overlapping technologies like recent ones MABS, Microsoft
Flow and Logic Apps, in some situation it gets puzzling. What you say?
Toon:
I guess this is one of the characteristics of using
cloud services. There's always overlap between different services, which can
make it confusing for many people. Once you starting digging into the
details and purpose of the different Azure services, you'll notice that there
are fundamental differences between them. It requires a good
understanding of the Azure PaaS offering, to ensure you use the right tool for
the right job. This often means combining different services into a
single integration solution. It's really a better together story!
Mahesh: Do you think BizTalk in cloud
(IAAS) is accepted over BizTalk on Prem? Which one you prefer - what pros and
cons you see?
Toon:
I don't have a real preference, as the integration
challenges remain the same. The decision to move BizTalk to the cloud is
mostly part of a broader cloud strategy of an organization. A lift-and-shift
scenario is often chosen to reduce the total cost of ownership of the server
infrastructure. BizTalk Server is, in such scenarios, just one of the
many applications that are moved to the cloud.
Mahesh: How do you see the step of
Microsoft releasing Feature Pack for BizTalk?
Toon:
I really love the more agile approach of bringing new
features to the BizTalk platform. Via this way, the product team can
faster implement the suggestions from its community and customer base.
These fast releases bring of course an extra responsibility to the product
team, as they need to guarantee enterprise-grade stability for these brand new
features. The first feature pack didn't bring that much value, but I'm
really looking forward to the next one, as it will extend the ALM capabilities
of BizTalk.
Mahesh: Microsoft is keeping on adding
many things under Hybrid Integration, where should be Integration developers be
focussing on?
Toon:
BizTalk Server and Logic Apps are the
beating heart of Microsoft's hybrid integration platform. When you're new
to integration, these are the two products that really deserve your
attention. Next to that, it's important to understand the fundamentals of
Azure API Management and ServiceBus. Don't be afraid to experiment and
play around with new Azure services. The documentation is quite good and
there's already great community content available at your fingertips!
Mahesh: Do you think the cost of using
cloud services(Logic App, Service Bus etc) will be more than having
infrastructure on prem.(Where transactions are in millions or more)?
Toon:
For smaller and mid-sized integration
layers, I'm convinced that serverless cloud integration will be a lot cheaper,
because you don't need to take care of the server infrastructure and you don't
have any fixed license costs. However, don't take it for granted that
consumption based billing is always cheaper. High throughput integrations
might become very costly, if you need to pay per execution. The fact that
the cost is very unpredictable, scares some big customers. I'm curious to
see whether Microsoft's pricing will anticipate on such scenarios, in the
future.
Thanks a
lot Toon for taking out time and sharing your insights, experiences, this will
surely benefit many !!!
Feel Free to ask questions to Toon in the
comments!!!!!!!!
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to BizTalk Expert : Interview with Wagner Silveira
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to BizTalk Expert : Interview with Eldert Grootenboer
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Congrats Toon on receiving first MVP Award !!!!!!!!
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