Background
First though, some background is necessary. At the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008, Microsoft unveiled Windows Azure—a new operating system designed for the cloud. Over the subsequent years, Windows Azure has become Microsoft's de facto cloud platform covering services, media, websites, mobile applications, and more. While BizTalk Server has been an established product for over ten years (and eight releases), cloud adoption has been driving connected systems across different services and Line-of-Business applications. To meet the growing demand for cloud-based integration, the Microsoft BizTalk team released the first version of BizTalk Services, named Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs Community Technology Preview (CTP) on December 17, 2011. The goal was for customers to be able to sign up in a shared environment and set up simple XML/EDI flows without worrying about installation and maintenance. The capabilities were rich enough to enable simple point-to-point integration scenarios; on April 9th of the following year, the CTP was refreshed, incorporating feedback from customers by providing additional capabilities.
The CTP environment was hosted on a publicly shared service, and therefore had restrictions on running users' custom code. Integration is rarely straightforward, and the ability for developers to write custom code and deploy it as part of their integration solutions was a key requirement. Customers had also needed guarantees around performance and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Hosting user assemblies as part of the cloud services became a reality by switching to per tenant deployment. Thus, the cloud offering known as BizTalk Services was born on June 3, 2013. Like many Azure services, BizTalk Services is expected to be updated at a regular cadence. The latest update as of this writing was on February 20, 2014. This technology is opening up new integration possibilities; with Microsoft's on-going investments, it will be on par with the capabilities of its on-premises cousin, BizTalk Server, in the near future.
