Overcoming Challenges in Microsoft Integration Technologies: Expert insights
[Music] hi everybody um welcome to today's episode of Zer on air we're at the integrate Summit and it's a great opportunity for me to grab people from our partner Network and from the community to come and have a chat about integration today I'm joined by Andrew Rivers from 345 technology thanks for joining us Andrew um can you just tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your background please uh yeah sure um I've been in software since 2000 uh before that I actually started off as an aeronautical engineer um and one of the things I found frustrating about that that job was because uh designing and building an aircraft took 15 years and you know I didn't want to be old and great before the first before my first first thing that I built went live and so the the whole um release cycle thing of software is what really appealed to me uh and so and I had a lot of transferable skills because I used to write code to do calculations for aircraft systems and and so I just then just went into writing code uh so got into software then and then by 2004 I was doing bis talk uh and then did that for a long time and then obviously natural progression into Azure and here we are today so how how do you deal with that sort of challenge that our software today crashes and burns all the time and your aeronautical background means you definitely don't want that to happen well it's a um funnily enough a lot of what we do in terms of you know I think one of the things that makes us really successful and and and different is that we do a lot of platform engineering that makes things reliable and understanding the fundamental things that make up resilience is does yeah even though the actual technology of you know particularly aircraft mechanical stuff versus software is so different but the mindset is very similar MH it's hard to kind of understand that you don't have single points of failure yeah and that you kind of understand what the reliability of things is and then you can make the appropriate choices of what the risk is and that sort of thing yeah I think it's quite good that actually because I I sort of you know just an off the comment sort of little joke there but actually it really brings me back to you know one of the things I've enjoyed watching some of the LinkedIn videos that you do recently because you talk about a lot of these Concepts don't you quite a bit and I guess for anybody watching um definitely go and check out 34 live Technologies videos where Andrew goes into some of these um sort of challenges like scalability and resilience so if we transfer that to what you guys do as a as a day job um what are some of the sort of challenges that you see customers have with integration technologies that were're talking about this week well one of the biggest challenges that all all customers seem to have is is often just getting started and knowing well there's all all this stuff in the cloud there's all this stuff in Azure where do I start because it's you know going and Building Things in Azure is like going and buying a Lego set and it's like well okay I've got all these different bricks how do they bolt together and how to do that so um so we spend a lot of time helping customers with the kind of Rapid adoption of of putting in a standard footprint yeah and because we put in a standard footprint repeatedly and we're now productizing that we might get on to that a little bit more um the other question that everyone says is well how much is that going to cost me and and if you haven't now we've got a standard footprint we've got standard Bild of materials standard cost and and that really helps people understand what it is they're getting into rather than I'm going to go into Azure and I'm going to write a black check blank check because I don't know what's going to happen the the you know one one of the things is just that kind of predictability um and and the other side of what we do is you know is understanding well how how how are you going to categorize your application in terms of business criticality and then what infrastructure do you need to to do that do you need cross Regional failover you know how how you going to manage your replication and how you going to manage state so a lot of those kind of fundamental platform engineering problems is what we're we're generally dealing with yeah uh in you know in then this is just me being cynical now but I've there's only so many times you can go around the loop of doing the um you standard integration patterns and you can't think well okay I've been there and done that but actually some of those core engineering challenges actually for me what I find really interesting and how we solve those things so when when you say um you're going to product uh productize some of the things that you talked about what what does that really mean then for three four five so we generally find that one you know customers often often spend a lot of time and a lot of money putting in infrastructure whereas actually what they're looking for is to spend their budget delivering business value of features I want to connect this system to this system I want to Auto automate this process and and then this s say well why have I spent three months putting in infrastructure before we even done that and so what we're trying to do is to Short Circuit that so that we can put in the infrastructure fast and so so our product 34 five there puts in our infrastructure footprint we can create sandbox environments Dev environments production environments but do that in you know in terms of planning and implementation if we can do that in a week rather than three months yeah then week two you're star to have values of the business rather than you start this project spend a load of money and then yeah at some point we'll get round to doing a feature yeah it's like no well let's let short circuit all that let's get that in quickly I think that that time to value is so important these days isn't it you know you like like you say you can spend a fortune before you see anything and then you know especially if you know sometimes the idea doesn't work out as well and you want to fail fast and stuff so when you um when you take the product idea and because I guess in in my head I'm thinking it sounds a little bit like a landing Zone but different in that it's it's more integration focused and it's more not just the the AO resources but maybe the process of how you use them um how do you think that trades off like Innovation and flexibility which is one of the things the product team pitches being a real big win for logic apps versus standardization which kind of takes away from that flexibility or do do you feel that's not quite the case that's a really interesting question and I think um there's a big Drive in terms of uh platform engineering towards the concept of paved Road or paved path you use those two terms which is um which is to enable developers to do the repeatable stuff fast so they can just concentrate on code now the fact that we've got standard Footprints doesn't mean that you're locked into that forever but what it does mean is that for the it's always 8020 isn't it so yeah 80% of times when that standard pallet of of components gives you what you need then you know you're straight there and we do that we can always do custom engineering if that's what you need it doesn't preclude that but it means that for all the times when that's not appropriate or that's not needed then you can just deliver value yeah so I I guess right tool for the right job again isn't it yeah so if we come if we come back to the integrate suit this week what what kind of things are you personally looking for at integrate in terms of sessions which ones really appeal to you what kind of products are you really interested in from a you so the I mean the the first thing and the main thing for me integrate every time is is the keynote because I think the keynote is the you know gives the signposts to everything else and so we look at um the keynote today and there's some really interesting things coming up with the hybrid deployments M uh and I'm very interested in that because obviously some customers are like oh I've got all my stuff on Prem and and the you know the logic apps H you know hybrid story has obviously been a long time in the making but actually I'm really interested in finding out more about that uh because I know you know there are a lot of there are a lot of our customer there's a lot of people we know that want to get off bis talk and all that sort of thing and and for some of them it's like yeah but I've got all this stuff on Prem yeah yeah so why don't I integrate close to where the apps are and and we're starting to get the the answers to that now we know we know that they've been sign posted for a long time but just you know getting so realizing it so I was realizing that and making it and making that happen so I'm really interested in that what do what do you think about um if we take a step back from the tech for a second um it was quite interesting in slav keynote when they talk about like the size of integration and how you know what what I think you said 2022 it was like six billion or something and it's it's actually so much bigger than that now is the projection and then the number of apps and the number of apis people are building it's kind of gone through the R so that that must really validate business choices that you've made for 34 five about the importance of the integration landscape based around Microsoft when obviously there was a lot of uncertainty for years around bis talk about what the future looked like it seems really solid and that there's much more people can do in that space now well this is this is right and I I think that you certainly with the customers I talk to they're barely scratching the surface of what's possible with apis as well so everyone's building apis but that whole governance discoverability unified you know unified authentication and getting all these disperate apis into into one technology that can at least make sense to them uh there's you know I see there's a long way to go before people really um you know obviously some are more ahead than others but that's a massive opportunity to help people there yeah because you know one I think one of our one of our customers had 37 applications that were all talking to the same system the same sass end point but they're all doing point to point and all getting the same data and it's like yeah well if you actually had total cost of ownership yeah the total cost of ownership all the maintenance every time you you got to change all those different things all the time and then if you know you change credentials and you got to change that so so the ability to simplify reduce the total cost of ownership reduce the maintenance um overhead there's just so many you know there's so many possibilities there to you know because because really one of the things that struck me with doing integration was the the ability to simplify because when you don't do integration well and this goes even back to B days yeah you would just see you go plac and there'd be a complete mess you know the integration included some scheduled task running on some server that no one knew about until you decommission that server and then something everything breaks or a bunch of stuff run under SQL agent and then stuff over there and and and what we've always been trying to do is bring it all together and then simplify because that just makes everyone's life easier we're still doing that yeah it's such an important message that isn't it I know I think um projects I've been on where logic apps implemented at one time and then you may not touch them for six months or a year and then you an application changes and you go back to it you get an opportunity to change it or redo it and and you know I think the mindset of like continuous simplification as part of continuous Improvement I think it's really what lowers that barrier is it for a customer you know because it regardless of what you implement you always get to the point of how do I maintain this long term and it's you know constantly simplify and makes that achievable I think yeah and also when again integration mindset you've got all these different applications to integrate with but if you you know you treat each of those as an interface you only want to do that interface once yeah and then and then reuse and reconnect so as long as you're trying you but you but as as you but as with all things in software you you're always learning as well you're always learning more so even though you kind of think you've done a good job first time around sometimes you come back six years or year later think you know what I could have done that yeah and and and so gradually as long as you can evolve things and make things continuously better than yeah I know um sand it's funny Side Story Sandro is working on a project at the minute where he's going to be rewriting a logic app where I wrote about five years ago and I'm dreading the feedback he's going to give me uh but it's done a good job since you know since it was put in nobody's really changed it but I'm sure there's they do things different over time wouldn't you and um so what when it comes to that um managing complexity what do you think's the tradeoff that you find in the real world between you know the design patterns help Empower you to build simpler Solutions or do you think sometimes they kind of over complicate some of those Solutions what what do you guys come across that's a really good one and and obviously the answer which is the answer we given 90% of the time is it depends um so design patterns are there to help you I think one of the one of the other things that I try to bear in mind is is also kind of an agile approach to things because when you can see you know you can see into the future and you know that I'm going to need to connect five different systems eventually but right now I've only got do one you know you could say well I'll put this massive pattern and do this this and this and sometimes you got bounce that against well okay I know that you're going to have to do all that in the future but right now the job is to do this and this and sometimes it can be there can be a conversation there to say well what's the most important thing is is is to get from here to The Next Step as fast as possible or is it to anticipate the future and make that whole thing less painful over five years and very often um you know very often customers actually say well I want you to do something simple now because we don't know if that second phase the project is going to happen so why are we going to go and build out all this stuff for something that might not happen and so so that's always a but even though you kind of know look yeah you're going to need this so so yeah there's a complexity typ Simplicity type time to get there I guess that's one of the things where the the productization of some of the stuff that you guys have done really comes into its own because you know a lot of the common things you're going to need which means instead of you know that that first step of doing it the simplest way you can because you don't know what's next but you can actually take advantage of some of them building blocks that you're going to put in I think's probably you know I've SE seen that kind of thing happen a few terms it makes a lot of sense yeah and over time you know as as you solve more problems you you kind of build in that you've got more of a toolbox then to to build into the product and and to sort of say well okay we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time but but you've just got you know you've just got more options so how do you um I guess when we think about some of the things we've talked about so far the the big underlying themes about um learning is so you know you've got all these different Technologies all the design patterns all the approaches in 3 four five technology how do you manage the team's skills to make sure people are up to date and they're learning the new things they need to learn and try and stuff out that they may need in six months time how do you do that organizationally we do that in a couple of ways um and and a couple of ways that sort of complement each other so so across our whole engineering team uh when we go through because we tend to do an annual and a quaron planning cycle and we set objectives for uh for all our guys as you know as as most companies do but and some of those will be you know te technology or learning things so people actually have you know people have as part of their quely objectives they they'll they'll have build a demo for this demonstrate you demonstrate this technology demonstrate gen uh or or pass this exam or that whatever whatever it is so so we we manage that but then on top of that we have a weekly engineering forum and so part of their objective might be to build a demo on something and then present it in an engineering for where that's shared across the rest of the team and you know not everyone can always make it so we always record that and then we've got like a library of of those as well so it's but it is difficult and I think every company finds it difficult when everyone is like heads down on the day job it's like how do you balance that across this other stuff and you just have to eek out yeah you know eek out an hour a week or something like that what what kind of things like from the stuff you're doing in those sessions what are the things that you think are going to be most applicable in say six month's time or a year's time the things customers are going to asking you about that you're sort of thinking about now because you know you're going to get projects for that in the future again if you look at again look looking at the keynote here and and some of the things that have been announced and going into um availability but one of the things we always struggle with there's always so much so I think you know you have to actually curate some of the best opportunities so you know API Center API management I think is a really big thing yeah yeah um and pulling all that together uh there is also you know just just you you cannot get away from Ai and really understanding what that means for our customers what that means in integration space what that means in terms of how do we get the training data for AI what that how how do we incorporate AI models into into into workflows how do we use geni to to develop faster because the um I mean ultimately you know what gives us competitive advantages you know in the past was going on knowledge and experience the fact we've got you know people with decades and Decades of experience and then just say well if if um you know as a competitive thing gen is just like game changers just game changing but gen plus Decades of experience yeah is actually an amazingly powerful thing so uh that's that's definitely I think that's the importance of the of the learning piece isn't it where you know there's been these themes in the industry over the last sort decade or so where there's like a reset point isn't it I think I think AI to me is another reset point where you know if you're not careful the 10 years plus experience that you've got kind of really comes down like reduces in size drastically because actually everybody's new to Ai and I think you know hopefully people who come to Summits like this it's kind of keeping your skills on board so you can use what you've learned in the past and apply it to what the new things that are coming out are and I think that that's you know for for you as an organization that's where those learning sort of um sessions that you do internally help keep people moving on their Journey which will help customers eventually yeah absolutely um but the other thing that I'm also quite keen on is the fact that um we're stronger as a team than we are as individuals so everyone can't learn everything yeah but what we and so we're kind of building up specializations in different people so that as a whole everyone knows that they can go to the engineering forum and ask a question and someone has got that thing so this you know spreading that out and being stronger as a whole team is a yeah it's a really great thing I think we're just coming up to time Andrew thank you very much for joining us today um we hope you have a really great weekend if I can just say to any viewers check out the LinkedIn videos that 345 share there's some really interesting topics on there and there any any last things you'd like to say before we wrap up Andrew um well first of all thanks for having me on but the the main thing is it's just um ultimately we're quite a small community and so anyone that's out there that doesn't know us everyone in integration is friendly and it's a really friendly place to be so by all means you know you know check out Mike and get in touch with him or get in touch with me we're always happy to uh you know happy to talk to people and be really welcoming yeah thank you very much and enjoy the rest of the summit bye thanks take care
2024-09-15 17:31
