Earlier this month, we published a blog post on why and how we made the shift to Composite Applications concept in Serverless360. At INTEGRATE 2017 USA, we demonstrated the brand new portal of Serverless360 with the Azure Composite Applications concept. The feedback was incredible and we could really see the value that the product adds to customers using hybrid integration solutions.
Today, we are excited to launch the brand new version of the Serverless360 portal with the new Composite Applications concept, management stack for Azure resource management, improvements to the User Access Policy and a new Message Repair and Resubmit capability.
Composite Applications
Most of the integration solutions built using Microsoft Azure technologies make use of 5-6 different services that constitute the solution. Ex: Azure Service Bus Queues, Topics, Logic Apps, Event Hubs, Relays, API’s and so on. Managing this complex integration solution becomes a cumbersome task for the administrators. The only management option you have now is via the Azure Portal, however, the Azure Portal is designed for vertical technology silos rather than managing composite applications. Users traverse through the portal on each technology stack back and forth.
We introduced the concept of Azure Composite Applications in Serverless360 where you can logically group together various resources or entities from Azure Subscriptions (same or multiple subscriptions) and namespaces that represent a Line of Business (LoB) application in your application architecture. Serverless360 provides serverless management and monitoring on the application group as a whole that contains these different Azure services.
As you can see from the above animation, users can create their own composite application group and add resources to the group. Within the composite application, users can perform operations and monitoring of the Azure resources, set up data monitors on the Logic Apps, configure and schedule activities to send messages to their Queues/Topics.
This provides easy access for end users to their applications without getting lost in the complex Azure Portal and increases productivity and control.
Management Stack
With the Composite Applications concept in place, we decided to completely move the management of Azure resources out of the Composite application. Say, you have 5 composite application groups and entities from a particular namespace is mapped in multiple composite application groups (say, 2), it will become difficult for the user to add a new resource into each namespace. To avoid this complication, we split the management stack from the composite application group and built it separately. Within the management stack, users can easily manage the Azure resources, perform basic CRUD operations, view the resource properties and so on. This gives the users complete flexibility when it comes to managing/monitoring the resources.
Improvements to User Access Policy
In the previous release, we enhanced the User Access Policy mechanism to allow administrators to define fine-grained security restrictions for normal users to different features in Serverless360. In this release, introducing the new Composite Applications and the Management stack concept, we enhanced the user access policy into two separate levels – Application level (for the Management Stack) and Operational level (for the Composite Applications).
In the Application level, super users can define the resources to which the normal user will have access and the basic operations that he can perform on the Azure resource. This relates particularly only to the Management Stack. For instance, if there are 3 Composite Applications, the administrator can grant access to only one Composite Application and say, permissions to create, edit and import Queues, Event Hubs and Logic Apps in the management stack as shown in the below screenshot.
In the Operations level, super users can define the features that the users should have access. Superusers can define permissions for the Operations, Monitoring and Analytics capabilities of Serverless360 and the underlying features within them. This section configures user access specifically for the Composite Applications. For example, super users can allow access to Queues, Topics and Logic Apps but disable access for the user to be able to perform any actions on Relays and Event Hubs within the Composite Application. The below screenshot shows the operational level access settings.
Repair and Resubmit Messages
Resubmitting messages is not a new functionality in Serverless360. In this release, we added the capability for users to be able to edit (repair) the messages before they can resubmit the messages back into the queue/topic. Here’s how you can achieve this in Serverless360.
That’s not just the end of it! We even revamped our website to reflect the new concepts added into Serverless360. Check out the Product Tour page to get detailed information about the product.
