Events, Messaging & Data
Asynchronous, event-driven and data integration
When direct, synchronous calls would couple your systems too tightly, or buckle under load, the answer is to integrate asynchronously, with a reliable message broker and events. It’s the Microsoft enterprise-integration reference architecture, and the way we build systems that stay up when volumes spike.
Decouple systems so one slow part can’t stop the rest
Putting a message broker between systems, instead of direct, synchronous calls, turns fragile chains into resilient flows.
Absorb the spikes
Queue-based load levelling smooths bursts in workload so back-ends aren’t overwhelmed.
Broadcast, don’t chase
The publish/subscribe pattern delivers one message to many interested consumers.
Survive outages
Messages queue safely when a back-end is temporarily unavailable, and process when it returns.
Track the long-running
Multi-step workflows across applications are followed reliably, end to end.
Change independently
Decoupled applications evolve on their own schedule without breaking their neighbours.
Meet systems where they are
Existing message-based systems integrate cleanly into the same fabric.
Messaging vs events vs streaming
Service Bus and Event Grid complement each other; Event Hubs handles the high-volume stream. We choose per flow, based on the delivery guarantees each one needs.
| Service | Use it for | Characteristics |
|---|---|---|
| Azure Service Bus | Commands and guaranteed delivery between decoupled systems | Reliable, ordered, transactional; queues, topics, PeekLock |
| Azure Event Grid | Reacting to things that happened; broadcasting to subscribers | Pub/sub routing; reactive; at-least-once; add subscribers freely |
| Azure Event Hubs | High-volume telemetry and event streaming | Millions of events; near-real-time analytics pipelines |
Service Bus offers a pull model where the receiver polls, and a proxied push model where it raises an Event Grid event to trigger the receiver in near real time, no continuous polling. In Logic Apps Standard, PeekLock lets a workflow validate a message before completing or abandoning it, preventing accidental loss.
Reliable messaging patterns
We build on the canonical Enterprise Integration Patterns, the shared vocabulary of messaging, and add the engineering that makes them dependable in production.
Publisher / subscriber
Decouple senders from receivers; notify every interested subscriber.
Competing consumers
Scale processing horizontally across many workers.
Saga / process manager
Coordinate long-running transactions across services.
Transactional outbox
Publish events reliably, without losing or duplicating them.
Claim-check
Pass large payloads by reference (Blob Storage), not by value.
…made production-grade
Dead-letter channels, idempotent receivers, retry with back-off & circuit breakers, and correlation IDs across every hop.
The same governed data feeds analytics and AI
Integration also means gathering and shaping information from many sources and formats.
Ingest & transform
Azure Data Factory runs ETL/ELT pipelines, including on-premises sources via the data gateway.
Govern & model
Microsoft Fabric provides a governed lakehouse (OneLake), modelling, catalogued data products and Power BI, the same governed data feeding AI and Copilot under Responsible AI controls.
See that the order actually completed
- Correlation identifiers follow each business transaction across every asynchronous hop.
- Distributed tracing (Application Insights / OpenTelemetry) stitches the hops together.
- Business Activity Monitoring tracks progress against business milestones, so operators know a payment completed, not just that each service is up.
Designed against the Well-Architected Framework, the messaging tier is resilient by configuration: Service Bus Premium supports availability zones and geo-disaster recovery with autoscaling messaging units; Event Grid replicates across zones and fails over automatically.
The stack
Let’s talk integration
Book a discovery workshop to map your integration estate, and see how a proven foundation lets you deploy solutions and accelerators safely, at speed.