What is Azure Scheduler?
Azure scheduler schedules a job at a particular time or for recurring intervals. It calls services inside or outside Azure by calling end points hosted on HTTP/S or posting messages to Azure Storage queues.
Why Azure Scheduler?
Scheduler is designed to operate even in the face of network, machine, or datacenter failures, so your scheduled jobs continue to execute on time. It can automatically switch to an alternative datacenter in the same region if needed. Users can also configure alternate endpoints, in case their main endpoint becomes unavailable.
Scheduler can also post messages to Azure Storage queues for asynchronous processing of recurring requests. This is useful for complex or long-running requests—such as a series of SQL queries against a large database—and when you want to invoke a service which is offline.
Who needs it?
- Executing Go-To-Market: For sending newsletters, sending push notifications.
- The SQL Azure does not support SQL jobs. So we cannot deploy the jobs on Azure. But we can schedule the job (stored procedure execution) on Azure by scheduler available in Azure Mobile Service.
- Recurring application actions: As an example, a service may periodically get data from twitter and gather the data into a regular feed.
- Daily maintenance: Web applications have needs such as daily pruning of logs, performing backups, and other maintenance tasks. An administrator may choose to back-up his/her database at 1AM every day for the next 9 months, for instance.
Azure BizTalk Service
What is Azure BizTalk Service?
Azure BizTalk Services is a simple, powerful and extensible cloud-based integration service. It provides Business-to-Business (B2B), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Hybrid Connections capabilities for delivering cloud and hybrid integration solutions. The service runs in a secure, dedicated, per-tenant environment that you can provision on demand.
Why BizTalk?
The Windows Azure platform-as-a-service (PaaS) version of BizTalk is revolutionizing the data exchange between businesses. This enables fast and cost-effective B2B integration, easy on-boarding of new partners, smooth monitoring, and with scalability and flexibility.
Easy, Fast and Cost-Effective B2B Integration
With Windows Azure BizTalk Services, you can easily and quickly connect your ordering and invoicing systems to any combination of Cloud and on-premise applications. As there is no software or appliances to install or maintain, you can realize huge cost savings on this type of B2B integration. All you need in this scenario is a web browser. You can sign up, log in and then build and deploy your integrations at whatever pace you require.
Easy Managing and On-Boarding of Trading Partners
Using Windows Azure BizTalk Services you can easily on-board new trading partners for business-to-business messaging. It doesn’t require either special knowledge or custom coding. You can simply add a new partner and configure data exchange information in a familiar Windows environment. Thus, you can cut down the time needed for this from days to hours.
Scalability and Flexibility
With Windows Azure BizTalk Services you pay only for what you use (in terms of the number of trading partners and exchanged data). Thanks to that, you can easily test the solution with minimum investment and then scale it up if proven useful. You can also scale it up during periods of peak growth in orders.
Savings on the EDI Processes Monitoring with Windows Azure
Another area of savings is the EDI processes monitoring. The Windows Azure Management Portal provides an in-depth view on the utilization of the deployed resources. This information helps to make the right decisions about procurement, right-sizing, scaling according to usage, and performance.
Additional Monitoring with Our Proprietary Tool
We also provide our own monitoring tool, extending standard capabilities of monitoring Windows Azure BizTalk Services and ensuring its 99.9% availability. Using this tool you can get access to additional reports on both the technical and business status of the processing operations, such as time and performance, which can be useful for Customer Service departments as well as external clients. In this way you don’t need to finance the costly hardware and software support for your EDI processes monitoring.
Compliance to All the Logistics Processes Standard
Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) has prebuilt support for thousands of predefined EDI schemas, including all the logistics EDI standards. You can easily modify these schemes to reflect an untypical standard used by one of your trading partners. WABS also supports the most common methods used to transmit EDI messages between trading partners, such as a Value Added Network (VAN) – allowing companies to send data which is then reviewed by the VAN and sent to the correct recipient, or AS2 (Applicability Statement 2). Using AS2, the EDI documents are transmitted across the internet and the security of the document is achieved through encryption and with the use of digital certificates.
Who Needs It?
BizTalk Services provides a robust and extensible solution for trading partner management and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) processing, which can lower the cost of business partner collaboration for enterprise and EDI service providers.
– For companies that have just implemented a Warehouse Management System/ Transportation system / Ecommerce / Self Service Portal/ ERP system recently, and have a need for the rapid integration with IT systems of their trading partners.
– For fast-growing small logistics, transport, and production businesses constrained by the costly and time-consuming necessity to adapt to the standards of EDI of larger trading partners.
– For mature companies with a stable situation, which, however, suffer from performance problems of their partner’s EDI platform during periods of peak growth in orders.