Get ready for an exciting digital experience at Microsoft Build 2024! Running May 21-23 in Seattle and online, this year’s event is all about delving deep into the cutting-edge world of AI and cloud technology. And if you’re eager to dive into the transformative world of Azure Integration Services, get ready for something special.

From seamless application and data integration to API management and powerful workflow automation, Azure Integration Services is revolutionizing the way businesses operate. Kantar, a global leader in marketing data, used Azure Integration Services to create the KantarHub, a centralized platform that simplifies data sharing and enhances security, integrating approximately 150 internal applications. Össur, a prosthetic innovation leader, migrated its diverse legacy apps to the cloud with Azure Integration Services, ensuring uninterrupted operations and improving data security and API access. These examples highlight how Azure Integration Services is transforming customer operations through seamless integration and increased efficiency. 

In this blog, we’ll unpack the major announcements for Azure Integration Services from this year’s Build event. Register today to attend! 

Azure API Management   

With the rise in Gen AI app usage, there’s an urgent need for enterprise-wide, federated access to manage and secure endpoints. This year, we’re excited to announce GenAI Gateway capabilities in Azure API Management to tackle these challenges for Azure OpenAI Services endpoints (general availability). 

As a first step, we’ve simplified the onboarding process so you can now import all Azure OpenAI endpoints into the Azure API Management platform with a single click. These endpoints will be protected by Azure API Management’s built-in managed identity authentication. For scaled workloads, we provide load balancing, rate limiting, and out-of-box observability support.  

Here’s a rundown of all the policies and features we’ve added:   

Import Azure OpenAI as an API: New Import Azure OpenAI as an API in Azure API management provides an easy single click experience to import your existing Azure OpenAI endpoints as APIs and simplifies the onboarding process.   
Azure OpenAI Token Limit Policy: Manage and enforce token-based limits per API consumer to ensure fair usage.   
Azure OpenAI Emit Token Metric Policy: Get detailed monitoring and analysis by logging the token usage metrics and sending those to Azure Application Insights.   
Load Balancer and Circuit Breaker: Distribute the load across multiple Azure OpenAI endpoints with support for various load distribution strategies ensuring optimal performance and reliability.   
Azure OpenAI Semantic Caching Policy (public preview): Optimize token usage by caching completions for semantically similar prompts improving response performance.  

Click here to learn more about the GenAI Gateway capabilities in Azure API Management. We launched the “Gen AI Gateway Accelerator,” a reference implementation that demonstrates how to provision and interact with Generative AI resources through API Management. This new scenario in the APIM landing zone accelerator helps accelerate our customers on their path to Gen AI production workloads. Learn more about the “Gen AI Gateway Accelerator” here. 

In addition, we have two features now in General Availability (GA): 

OData API Type : First-class support for OData makes it easier for customers to publish OData APIs in API Management, including the ability to secure them with standard API protections. You can now use Azure API Management for publishing APIs from platforms like SAP, Oracle, Dataverse, and others that expose OData APIs.  
gRPC API Type in Self-Hosted Gateway: Seamlessly manage your gRPC services as APIs within Azure API Management.  

Azure API Center   

Another exciting announcement—Azure API Center is now in General Availability! Complementing Azure API Management, Azure API Center is a centralized solution that offers a unified inventory for seamless discovery, consumption, and governance of APIs, regardless of their type, lifecycle stage, or deployment location. With Azure API Center, your organization can effectively manage your API landscape and promote efficiency, consistency, and innovation across the board.   

Key features of Azure API Center include:  

API Inventory Management: Create an up-to-date API catalog that includes essential metadata like API names, descriptions, lifecycle stages, and owners. Custom metadata can be added to capture organization-specific API information.   
API Cataloging for Azure API Management: Quickly import APIs into API Center via a single CLI command, creating a cohesive center across different API Management services.    
API Design Governance: Enable API best practices at scale and enforce design rules across your organization. This empowers API developers to ensure quality and uniformity across all produced APIs.   
API Reusability: Foster reusability by empowering consumers to swiftly discover and utilize the appropriate APIs.   
API Development Enhancement: Seamlessly integrate with our API Center Visual Studio Code extension, enhancing and simplifying the API development process.   

Azure Logic Apps   

By simplifying and automating how you connect and integrate various applications, services, and data sources in the cloud, Azure Logic Apps users can create and run automated workflows with little to no code. Recent updates to the platform include new features that enhance seamless management of integration flows, simplify legacy integration, and enable efficient B2B integration. 

Seamless Management of Integration Flows 

Efficiently monitoring, troubleshooting, and updating automated workflows can be challenging, especially when dealing with multiple integrations. To address these pain points, we’ve introduced: 

Support for Zero Downtime deployment scenarios in the portal (public preview for Logic Apps Standard): Zero downtime deployment is a technique that allows updating an application without affecting its availability or performance. Logic Apps Standard now supports zero downtime deployment by using deployment slots, which are isolated environments that can host different versions of the application and can be swapped with the production slot without any interruption.  Click here more details. 
Logic Apps Monitoring dashboard for workflow monitoring, troubleshooting and resubmissions (public preview): We have released UI dashboards for Logic Apps Standard to help with diagnosis and troubleshooting of Logic Apps workflow runs and failures. The dashboard also offers the ability to take actions such as bulk resubmission of failed runs. 

Advanced Development and Customization  

Developers need the flexibility to customize workflows and integrate the latest technologies seamlessly, while also benefiting from efficient debugging and development environments. 

.NET 8 Custom Code Support (public preview for Logic Apps Standard): We’ve extended our built-in action capabilities to include support for calling .NET 8 custom code. Within a Logic Apps workspace, you can now effortlessly develop and debug your custom code right alongside your workflows, streamlining your development process with the most up-to-date .NET technology. 
Improved Onboarding Experience on VS Code for Logic Apps Standard (general availability): Extend the Logic App designer to empower users to transition from developing workflows in the cloud to a local environment. The intuitive no-code designer of Logic Apps combined with the powerful pro-code capabilities of VS Code has enabled developers to build, run and test their Logic App workflows locally with features such as breakpoint debugging.   
Logic Apps Standard Deployment Scripting Tools in VS Code (public preview for Logic Apps Standard): For Standard logic app workflows that run in single-tenant Azure Logic Apps, you can use Visual Studio Code with the Azure Logic Apps Standard extension to locally develop, test, and store your logic app project using any source control system. You can also use the extension to streamline the creation of deployment pipelines, automating the deployment of your Logic Apps Standard infrastructure and code. Click here for more technical details. 

B2B Integration 

Managing complex B2B transactions and integrations requires robust, scalable solutions and efficient management tools. And, we have new features to help with these transactions: 

EDI (X12/EDIFACT) processing with built in actions (general availability): Run B2B workloads at scale with connectors that can process single or batched EDI messages and larger payloads, providing greater control over performance.  
Integration Account Enhancements (public preview): Integration Account Premium offers UI based Trading Partner management capabilities and centralized store for artifacts including maps and schemas. With this release, we have enabled Availably Zone support for Integration Account. 

Mainframes and midranges Integration 

Extending the functionality of legacy systems to the cloud without extensive re-investment can be difficult. That’s why we have connectors for IBM mainframes and midranges. 

Azure Logic Apps connectors for IBM Mainframe and Midranges: Preserve the value of your workloads running on mainframes and midranges by extending them to the Azure Cloud, without investing more resources on the mainframe or midrange environments using Azure Logic Apps. Click here for more technical details. 

Azure Service Bus   

Azure Service Bus is a fully managed enterprise message broker that ensures secure and efficient delivery of data messages between different parts of your system, even when they’re disconnected or processing tasks at different speeds. At Build, we’re thrilled to announce a new feature: batch delete. Currently in preview, this feature empowers customers to delete messages on the service side from an entity or the dead letter queue in batches of up to 4,000 messages.  

Azure Event Grid   

Like an event dispatcher for your cloud, Azure Event Grid triggers actions across your applications and services in near real-time whenever something significant happens. New features are generally available that are tailored to customers who are looking for a pub-sub message broker that can enable Internet of Things (IoT) solutions using MQTT protocol and can help build event-driven applications.  

These capabilities enhance Event Grid’s MQTT broker capability, make it easier to transition to Event Grid namespaces for push and pull delivery of messages, and integrate new sources. Customers can now:  

Use the Last Will Testament feature in compliance with MQTT v5 and MQTT v.3.1.1 specifications, so applications can get notifications when clients get disconnected, enabling management of downstream tasks to prevent performance degradation.  
Create data pipelines that utilize both Event Grid Basic resources and Event Grid Namespace Topics (supported in Event Grid Standard). This means customers can utilize Event Grid namespace capabilities such as MQTT broker without needing to reconstruct existing workflows.  
Support new event sources, such as Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Outlook, leveraging Event Grid’s support for the Microsoft Graph API. This means customers can use Event Grid for new use cases, like when a new employee is hired or a new email is received, to process that information and send to other applications for more action.  

For more technical details on these announcements, click here. 

See you at Build for these exciting sessions! 

Don’t miss the chance to explore these exciting updates at Microsoft Build 2024. Register now and if you’re attending in-person, be sure to stop by the Azure API Management booth in The Hub! You can meet with the engineering and product teams behind API Management and API Center, and further explore Azure Integration Services capabilities to discover exciting new solutions. 

Join us for these breakout sessions both in-person or online:  

Unleash the Potential of APIs with Azure API Management: Through practical demos we’ll show how to use Azure API Management to expose Azure OpenAI services, manage OpenAI tokens allocation, distribute load across multiple model deployments and gain valuable insights into token usage throughout your intelligent applications portfolio. Explore how Azure API Center revolutionizes API governance and discoverability, driving innovation and efficiency in your organization’s operations.  

GenAI Gateway Capabilities in Azure API Management: We will demonstrate how API Management can be configured for authentication and authorization for OpenAI endpoint, enforcing rate limits based on OpenAI tokens used, load balancing across multiple OpenAI endpoints and more.  

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