INTEGRATE 2025 Day 2 Highlights

#1: Enhancing Developer Efficiency with Logic Apps

The session led by Wagner Silvera, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, focused on enhancing the developer experience for Azure Logic Apps. Here’s a concise summary of the key points discussed:

Introduction and Agenda:

Wagner introduced the session by emphasizing the importance of improving the developer experience in Logic Apps. The agenda included discussions on workspaces, unit testing, custom components, and the new “code for workflows” feature.

Workspaces:

• Workspaces are now a central feature in Azure Logic Apps, allowing developers to manage multiple resources in one place.
• A prescribed structure for organizing code helps in generating deployment scripts and managing custom code effectively.
• A prescribed structure for organizing code helps in generating deployment scripts and managing custom code effectively.

Migrating Existing Projects:

• For existing Logic Apps projects, a migration process is available to transition to the new workspace paradigm without losing existing configurations.
• A cloud-to-local feature allows developers to import Logic Apps from the Azure portal into their local development environment seamlessly.

Automated Testing Framework:

• The session introduced a unit testing framework specifically designed for Logic Apps, allowing developers to test workflows effectively.
• The session introduced a unit testing framework specifically designed for Logic Apps, allowing developers to test workflows effectively.
• The framework supports mocking external dependencies, allowing for isolated testing of workflow logic.

Custom Code and Scripting:

• The session highlighted the integration of custom code within Logic Apps, allowing developers to write inline scripts in languages like C# and PowerShell.
• Improvements in the custom code experience include the ability to bring in external packages and dependency injection, enhancing the flexibility of Logic Apps.

Code for Workflows:

• This new feature allows developers to create workflows using an imperative programming model, combining code with the existing declarative workflow model.
• This new feature allows developers to create workflows using an imperative programming model, combining code with the existing declarative workflow model.

Operational Capabilities:

• The integration of code for workflows maintains the operational capabilities of Logic Apps, allowing for monitoring, logging, and debugging within the same application.

Future Plans:

• The session concluded with a preview of upcoming features and improvements, including the general availability of custom code and enhanced unit testing capabilities.

Overall, the session emphasized Microsoft’s commitment to improving the developer experience in Azure Logic Apps through enhanced tooling, better testing frameworks, and the integration of coding capabilities, making it easier for developers to build and manage workflows effectively.

#2: Help! My Azure bill just keeps getting bigger

This session by Michael Stephenson – a FinOps certified practitioner and Microsoft MVP addresses the pervasive problem of escalating Azure costs, highlighting that many organizations, in their rush to adopt cloud technologies, often overlook the crucial aspect of cost sustainability. He emphasizes that a significant portion of cloud spending, estimated at 20-30%, is wasted due to a lack of visibility, disconnect between roles, and absence of accountability. He advocates for cultivating a cost-aware culture where everyone understands their contribution to the Azure bill and actively seeks to maximize value while minimizing waste.

Integration Projects: A Prime Example of Cost Fluctuation

The session delves into the specific challenges of managing costs in integration projects, noting that unlike the fixed costs of on-premise solutions, cloud-based integration services often have consumption-based pricing models that can lead to unpredictable cost fluctuations. Services like Logic Apps and Function Apps, while offering flexibility, can incur variable costs depending on load and processing requirements. Stephenson points out the surprising rarity of cost-related non-functional requirements (NFRs) in projects, suggesting that incorporating cost targets can significantly shift the mindset and drive more cost-conscious decisions.

Turbo360: A Tool for Cost Optimization

To address these challenges, Stephenson proposes a practical, iterative approach to FinOps, starting with gaining visibility into cost data, analyzing key cost drivers, monitoring for anomalies, and then optimizing resource utilization. He introduces Turbo360 as a tool to facilitate this process, offering features such as cost analysis dashboards, budgeting and monitoring capabilities, rightsizing recommendations, reservation management, and scheduling for automated resource scaling.

The session also features James Reed from West Coast Cloud, who shares how they leverage Turbo360 as a prospecting tool, providing potential customers with a report highlighting cost-saving opportunities in their environment. This allows them to present a concrete plan for cost reduction, demonstrating tangible value and building trust.

Finally, Stephenson uses the analogy of a garden to illustrate the importance of ongoing cost management, emphasizing the need for a “gardener” to maintain a healthy cloud environment. He outlines key “gardening” activities, including eliminating unused resources, monitoring for cost creep, mitigating unexpected spend, and optimizing resource utilization.

Ultimately, the session argues that effective Azure cost management is not just about saving money, but also about freeing up resources to invest in innovation. By turning waste into value, organizations can fund new initiatives, such as AI, and drive business growth. Stephenson concludes by providing resources for further learning, including the Turbo360 YouTube channel, Azure on Air podcast, FinOps on Azure podcast and a cost management playbook. The core message is that by taking a proactive and strategic approach to Azure cost management, organizations can regain control of their cloud spending, optimize resource utilization, and unlock the full potential of the cloud.

#3: Event driven applications with Azure Messaging

Here’s a summary of the session on event-driven architectures with Azure Messaging, featuring Clemens Vasters and Roberto Cervantes:

Roberto Cervantes (Event Grid):

• Event Grid Evolution: Event Grid is evolving beyond a traditional push-delivery event broker, integrating pull delivery, an MQTT broker, and more.
• Webhooks and Web: Event Grid offers various resources like system topics, domains, custom topics, and partner topics. Event Grid Namespaces (standard tier) introduce flexible consumption models, enabling both push and pull mechanisms. Private Link support is available for consuming events from private destinations.
• MQTT Broker: Event Grid now includes a highly scalable, low-latency, and secure MQTT broker, facilitating communication between devices and applications.
• Industry Use Cases: Predictive maintenance, security, remote monitoring, and connected environments are key areas. New patterns like many-to-one and one-to-many are emerging.
• Sparkplug B: Event Grid supports Sparkplug B, a protocol used in industrial IoT for efficient message packaging and transmission.
• Unified Namespaces: The concept of unified namespaces aims to create a single source of truth by connecting smart applications through a defined structure, leveraging Sparkplug B.
• AMQP: Azure is committed to bringing AMQP support to public preview, aiming for standardization, reliability, and security.
• Fabric Integration: A new connector in Fabric’s real-time hub allows publishing to Event Grid namespaces and connecting to Fabric for building powerful solutions (e.g., automotive fleet solutions).
• What’s New in Event Grid: Investments in security, cross-tenant scenarios, network security perimeter integration, managed identity support for webhooks, OpenID Connect providers for MQTT, dynamic authentication using webhooks/Azure Functions, and assigned client identifiers.
• Coming Soon: General Availability (GA) for public preview features, AMQP support, retain HTTP publish, bulk API for device registration, increased message size for MQTT, and shared subscriptions.

Demo:

• A simulation of industrial IoT devices using Event Grid with MQTT broker enabled.
• Sparkplug B protocol used for sending/receiving messages.
• Subscription to receive MQTT messages in a webhook, with data sent to Fabric, Event Stream, and Event Hub.
• Demonstrated bidirectional communication between applications using MQTT.

Clemens Vasters (Metadata and Messaging):

• Unified Namespace (revisited): Formalizing the unified namespace concept using X Registry to capture machine status messages with assigned paths.
• Metadata Importance: Emphasizing the need for schemas to improve data quality and clarify intent, especially for AI applications.
• Cloud Events: A standard for defining events and their protocol bindings (cloudevents.io).
• X Registry: An extensible registry for metadata, endpoints, schemas, and message metadata, providing a formal way to format streams and define schemas for data in pipelines (xregistry.soaphub.org).
• MCP XReg: A temporary site (mcpxreg.com) with X Registry plugins and models for agent card providers, API providers, and container registries, aiming to build a uniform message metadata graph.
• JSON Structure: A proposed IETF Internet draft (json-structure.org) to fix the problems of JSON Schema by simplifying it, providing a better type system, and offering annotations for scientific units and currencies.

Key Takeaways:

• Azure Messaging is evolving to support diverse event-driven scenarios, including IoT and real-time data processing.
• MQTT and AMQP are becoming increasingly important protocols.
• Metadata and schemas are crucial for data quality and AI applications.
• X Registry and JSON Structure are initiatives to improve metadata management and data definition.

#4: Lessons from the frontlines: Real-world success with Azure API Management across Security, Governance, and AI

The session focuses on common patterns observed in API management across various customers, highlighting real-world examples and discussing Azure’s investments in this area. The speakers – Anish Tallapureddy and Alex Vieira emphasize the increasing importance of API management due to the growing complexity and sprawl of APIs, especially with the rise of AI.

Key Points:

• API First Approach: Many enterprises are adopting an API-first approach to improve agility, enable parallel development, and shift security left. Moneris, a fintech company, was cited as an example of a company that has adopted an API first approach as part of their business model.
• Microservices and Modernization: Modernizing legacy applications with microservices and containers presents challenges in managing APIs at scale. Zeiss, a multinational company, was mentioned as an example of a company that has adopted containers and frameworks like Dapr, and leverages Azure API management in order to expose these APIs.
• SaaS Integration: Integrating with various SaaS solutions requires secure connectivity, token management, and observability. Gucci, a company from Switzerland, was mentioned as an example of a company that leverages Azure API management, in order to provide its connectivity layer with support for all data and other protocols.
• Low Code/No Code Integration: Enterprises are using low-code platforms like Power Apps to build UIs quickly, with API Management acting as a bridge between pro-code and low-code development. Tokyo Metro was cited as an example of a company that has adopted an architecture that describes the relation between the pro code and the low code.
• Event-Driven Architectures: Real-time data and the need for systems to react to events are driving the adoption of event-driven architectures. Mercedes Benz was cited as an example of a company that wants to modernize the way that they were handling the vehicles.
• AI and APIs: APIs are crucial for accessing AI models and integrating AI into existing workloads. D-ID, a company that is building avatars very easily, was cited as an example of a company that is implementing Azure API management, so that when a certain user access to the APIs, the APIs are being exposed through Azure API management.
• Developer Experience: Azure is investing in improving the developer experience through AI-powered authoring, schema-first workflows, and integrations with tools like VS Code and GitHub.
• API Security: Security is a top priority, with Azure offering features like Defender for APIs, security policies, and credential-less access.
• Self-Hosted Gateway: The self-hosted gateway is a critical component for extending API management to various environments, including on-premises, other clouds, and Kubernetes.
• Business Outcomes: A Forrester study indicates a 315% ROI with Azure API Management over three years, driven by accelerated time to market and reduced integration costs.

#5: What’s new with Integration Environment and Business Process Tracking?

Kent Weare and Divya Swarnkar presented updates on optimizing operations within Azure Integration Services (AIS). The presentation covered integration environment updates, business process tracking, and the use of operational agents to improve productivity.

Integration Environment Updates (Divya):

• Alerting and Monitoring Enhancements: The focus is on simplifying and streamlining the alert creation process within the integration environment, providing a unified experience across Azure integration services.
• Simplified Alert Creation: Instead of navigating Azure Monitor’s multi-step process, users can now create alerts directly within the integration environment.
• Recommended Alert Rules: The system provides pre-defined, recommended alert rules based on common customer needs and telemetry analysis, with customizable thresholds. These are available for Logic Apps, API Management, and Service Bus.
• Bulk Alert Creation: Alerts can be created for multiple resources (e.g., multiple Logic App workflows) simultaneously.
• Application Health Dashboard: An aggregated view of application health, showing the number of alerts fired and their severity. Clicking on alerts provides detailed insights and troubleshooting options.
• Message Tracing: A unique correlation ID (operation ID) flows across AIS resources, enabling end-to-end message tracing. Users can visualize the journey of a message across Logic Apps, API Management, etc.
• Bulk Resubmission: Failed Logic App runs can be resubmitted in bulk from the monitoring dashboards.
• B2B/EDI Tracking with Premium Integration Account: Support for B2B and EDI tracking has been added to the premium tier of integration accounts.
• Azure Data Explorer (ADX) for B2B Tracking: Tracking data is stored in ADX for reliability and low latency, providing near real-time telemetry for B2B solutions.
• Extensible Dashboards: Dashboards are based on workbooks, making them highly extensible to meet unique business needs. Users can also build custom Power BI dashboards using the data in ADX.
• B2B Tracking ID: A new optional field in Logic Apps allows users to add custom business data to track, filter, and search messages.
• Demo of EDI Dashboard: Although there was a permission issue during the live demo, the presenter described the dashboard’s capabilities, including a high-level view of errors by partner and the status of AS2/X12 EDI processing.

Business Process Tracking (Kent Weare):

• Business Stakeholder Engagement: Business process tracking allows users to model business processes, connect them to technical implementations (Logic Apps), and provide business stakeholders with visibility into process status.
• Azure Data Explorer (ADX) for Business Process Tracking: Data is published to ADX for speed and reliability.
• Extensibility: Supports extension using Power BI or Azure Monitor workbooks.
• CICD Support (GA Release): Introduces CICD support, making solutions portable. Users can export a deployed business process to a zip file containing ARM templates and pipelines. An updated Azure DevOps marketplace task helps integrate business process tracking with Logic Apps CI pipelines.
• Demo: Showed the design surface for modeling business processes, defining data properties, and mapping them to Logic App workflows using the token picker. Demonstrated both successful and failed paths, with deep links to the underlying Logic App runs.
• Extensibility Examples: Showed examples of consuming business process tracking data in Power BI and using Azure workbooks. Mentioned an alert template for business process tracking that sends alerts on failures.

Operational Agents (Kent Weare):

• SRE Agent: Leverages AI to improve productivity and reduce mean time to restore (MTTR). The SRE agent analyzes resource groups, identifies issues, and provides proactive or reactive support.
• Integration with Azure Monitor: Alerts raised in Azure Monitor are surfaced in the SRE agent console, providing a centralized view of issues.
• Root Cause Analysis and Recommendations: The agent performs root cause analysis, provides diagnostic findings, and suggests recommended actions.
• Best Practice Identification: The agent can identify opportunities to improve resource configurations (e.g., recommending TLS 1.2).
• Agent Loop: A framework for orchestrating complex operational processes using a combination of tools, workflows, connectors, actions, and knowledge.
• Knowledge-Driven Automation: Agent Loop can ingest information from operational runbooks (e.g., wikis, SharePoint documents) and use it to drive business processes.
• Demo: Demonstrated a scenario where Agent Loop helps resolve a blocked billing code issue in an ERP system. The agent interacts with a business user via Teams to unblock the code, resubmits the Logic App run, and updates ServiceNow.

Call to Action:

• Links to the Business Process Tracking GA blog post and in-product documentation were provided.
• Feedback is requested on integration environment monitoring via a survey.

#6: Enhance API developer productivity and accelerate API adoption with Azure API platform

This session by Sreekanth Thirthala Venkata, Alex Vieira and Kristof Van Tomme focuses on enhancing developer productivity using the Azure API Management platform, highlighting key challenges in the API development lifecycle and demonstrating solutions with Azure’s services and AI-driven tools.

Key Discussion Points:

• API Developer Lifecycle Challenges: The speakers identify challenges such as difficulty in API discovery, ensuring design standard compliance, API security, version control, and documentation consistency.



• Azure API Management and API Center: They introduce Azure API Management as a mature service for processing API transactions and the API Center for central governance and tracking of APIs.



• AI-Powered Solutions: The presentation showcases how AI, particularly GitHub Copilot, streamlines API discovery, design, and policy creation. Demos include using Copilot to find existing APIs, generate new compliant APIs, and create rate-limiting policies.



• End-to-End Demo Scenario: An order processing API is built, secured, and published using available marketplace APIs. The demo covers designing the API, securing it with OAuth using the applications feature, and customizing the developer portal.
• API Security with Applications Feature: The newly launched applications feature in limited public preview is demonstrated, enabling API access authorization using OAuth tokens without needing validated JWT token policies.
• Developer Portal Customization: The presentation demonstrates customizing the developer portal with HTML widgets and custom pages to improve the developer experience.
• Monitoring and Observability: The speakers discuss investments in monitoring and observability, including the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) agent, to ensure API gateway reliability and automate incident management.

Key Takeaways:

• Azure API Management, combined with AI tools, significantly accelerates API development and enhances developer productivity.
• The applications feature simplifies API security by enabling OAuth-based authorization.
• Customizable developer portals and partner solutions provide flexibility to meet specific organizational needs.
• Monitoring and observability tools are crucial for maintaining API reliability and optimizing performance.

#7: Enhance API developer productivity and accelerate API adoption with Azure API platform

The session focused on securing and scaling APIs using Azure API Management, particularly with the AI Gateway. Andrei Kamenev and Julia Kasper discussed the challenges in building AI-powered applications, such as security, tracking AI consumption, and ensuring safety. They highlighted the AI Gateway as a solution to these challenges, offering features like token rate limiting, usage tracking, and content safety integration. The session also covered the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and how Azure API Management is integrating with it to simplify the development and management of AI-powered applications.

Key Takeaways:

• OpenAI Compatible APIs Support: The AI Gateway now supports all OpenAI compatible APIs, regardless of their deployment location (Azure or elsewhere).



• Responses API Support: Added support for Responses API, a new type of API from OpenAI.
• Content Safety Integration GA: Content Safety integration is now generally available, allowing users to integrate AI APIs with content safety features to detect and block harmful content.
• Semantic Caching GA: Semantic caching is now generally available, enabling the AI Gateway to return completions from the cache for semantically similar prompts, optimizing workload and reducing token costs.
• Amazon Bedrock API Support: The AI Gateway now supports Amazon Bedrock API, allowing users to bring cloud models deployed on Amazon into API Management without changing their developer experience.
• AI Gateway Release Channel: A new release channel is introduced in API Management portal, allowing users to receive new features as soon as they are shipped to production.
• Logs and Prompts Completion Logging: Introduced logs and prompts completion logging to collect prompts and completions, which can be broken down into multiple entries if they exceed the maximum size limit.
• REST APIs to MCP Servers: You can now transform your REST APIs into MCP servers.



• Azure API Center Integration: Azure API Center is now part of the Azure API Management product portfolio, serving as an inventory and registry for APIs and MCP servers.

#8: Effective API governance in the era of AI with Azure API Management

Here is the glimpse of the session by Mike Budzynski and Mark Weitzel on API governance with API Management.

Key Themes:

• Federated API Management: The core concept is empowering API teams with autonomy while maintaining centralized oversight from a platform team. This involves decentralizing API management without losing governance.
• Azure Services Enabling Federated API Management: The session focuses on three main Azure services: Azure API Management, Azure API Center, and Azure Policy.
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud: Applying federated API security across API management services.

Azure API Management – Workspaces:

• Workspaces as a Key Feature: Workspaces enable federated API management by providing control plane isolation, optional API runtime isolation, and API platform team controls.
• Control Plane Isolation: Workspaces act like folders with assigned permissions, isolating API teams.
• Optional API Runtime Isolation: Workspaces can be associated with dedicated or shared gateways, allowing for workload segregation and improved security/reliability.
• API Platform Team Controls: Platform teams can enforce runtime policies across workspaces, implement federated logging, and maintain a centralized developer portal.
• Shared Workspace Gateway: Allows associating up to 30 workspaces with a single gateway for cost optimization.
• Federated Logging: Platform teams have central visibility into logs across all workspaces, while API teams only see their own workspace logs.
• Gateway Metrics and Auto Scale: Gateways now support CPU and memory metrics, enabling auto-scaling based on these metrics or schedules.
• Regional Support: Workspaces are expanding to more regions, including West Europe.
• Premium v2 Support: Workspaces are now available in Premium v2 (programmatic access initially, UI support coming soon).
• Roadmap: Custom hostnames, managed identities, and Defender for Cloud integration are planned for workspaces.

Azure API Center:

• Federated API Inventory: API Center allows federating API inventory from various locations (Azure, AWS, other clouds) and lifecycle stages.
• Metadata Support: Supports metadata to better structure and organize the API inventory for discovery and governance.
• API Design Compliance: Enables defining and enforcing API design rule sets, with integration into Visual Studio Code for shift-left compliance.
• AI Integration: Integrates with GitHub Copilot to facilitate API creation (e.g., OpenAPI specs).
• API Discovery: Facilitates discovery of APIs across solutions, clouds, deployment locations, and lifecycle stages.
• Integration with API Management: The free tier of API Center will be perpetually free with an API Management Service. The standard tier of API Center will be included with API Management Standard or Premium.

Azure Policy:

• Enforcing Best Practices: Azure Policy allows implementing best practices, security controls, and configuration controls across API Management services and APIs.
• Built-in and Custom Policies: Supports built-in policy definitions and custom policy definitions for specific use cases.
• Enforcement and Auditing: Policies can enforce compliance on new resources or flag/audit compliance for existing resources.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud:

• Federated API Security: Provides advanced API security for APIs, especially in managing API Management services.
• Threat Detection: Uses machine learning models to detect threats in near real-time.
• API Security Posture Analysis: Discovers unauthenticated, externally exposed, sensitive, or dormant APIs.
• API Security Posture in Defender CSPM: API security posture analysis is included in Defender CSPM.
• Discovery of API Led Attack Paths: Maps APIs to backend services to understand potential impact of API breaches.
• Discovery of Unmanaged APIs: Will discover APIs across Azure App Services (Function Apps, Logic Apps, Web Apps) to identify potentially vulnerable APIs.

What’s New in API Management:

• The API management team has been adding capabilities across various parts and scenarios of the product.
• Federated API management of workspaces, making API management intelligent with various Copilots.
• Enhancements to validate Azure AD token and validate JWT policies.
• Enhancements to Defender.
• Premium v2 preview with virtual network injection, as well as private link capabilities.
• Making API management more user friendly to developers and, making our developers more effective and more efficient.
• AI capabilities, including the gateway, including MCP servers.
• More capabilities to API Center and the cataloging experiences across API Engine and API Center.

Coming Soon:

• Service Bus Integration: API Management will allow managing Service Bus queues and topics as APIs, enabling policies, observability, and security.
• SAP Integration: API Management can front SAP APIs, applying policies, observability, security, and governance controls.

Overall Message:

The session highlights the shift towards federated API management and the tools and services Azure provides to support this approach. The focus is on empowering API teams while maintaining centralized governance, improving security, and enabling better API discovery and management. The presenter emphasized the continuous improvements and new features being added to Azure API Management and related services.