Welcome to today’s session, where we’ll be exploring how to transition from legacy BizTalk servers to modern cloud solutions. One of the key challenges in this migration process is dealing with the business rule engine (BRE) that’s integral to many BizTalk setups. We’ll discuss the current state of the BRE in Azure, including its capabilities, limitations, and alternatives that could better suit your needs in the modern cloud environment. Whether you’re looking to innovate or simply maintain your existing rules, we’ll guide you through the options available to make the best choice for your business
As you know, one of the things we do is help you phase out your legacy BizTalk servers and migrate to a nice, shiny new cloud environment. However, there are some challenges that make this difficult for many people. Today, I’m going to talk about one of those challenges: the business rule engine, often abbreviated as BRE. BizTalk comes with the business rule engine, and many people use it because there’s not much else like it. It’s a really powerful piece of logic that includes a database and a Windows service that sits on top of it. You can interact with it from orchestrations or through code, allowing you to implement rules, as the name suggests.
But people use it for a lot of other purposes as well, such as configuration, because you can change things on the fly and republish them to the rules engine without redeploying your BizTalk application. It’s a way to make changes without redeploying your BizTalk application, and many people have used the business rule engine for that. The challenge, however, is that they often have numerous policies in the business rules engine, and some of these can be quite complex.
The real challenge is that the business rules engine has not historically been natively supported in Azure, and there are limited alternatives. Rules engines used to be quite common, but the industry has gone quiet on them, although the need for them persists. Everyone still needs rules; everyone needs “if this, then that” functionality. The good news is that, currently, the business rules engine for Azure is in public preview. This is great because it means you can start developing and testing solutions, but it’s not yet generally available. If you want to go live with it, you’ll need to wait for general availability.
Another consideration is whether you actually need the business rules engine. If you have a lot of rules that are primarily for configuration or because you need to be able to change things easily, there are now alternatives in Azure that might serve you better. So, do you want to innovate? Do you want to analyze how you’re using the rules engine and explore better alternatives using the modern cloud stack tools available today?
Take some time to look into this and think about it. If you need to discuss it, feel free to reach out to me. So, regarding the business rules engine: wait for general availability, or innovate. The choice is yours.
