Azure Architecture Guide

Choosing Integration Services

What This Chapter Is About

Help readers choose how Azure systems should communicate across services, applications, partners, and workflows.

This chapter clarifies the difference between reliable commands, event notifications, high-volume streams, and business process orchestration. The focus is not to memorize integration services. The focus is to understand the communication contract each service supports.

Keep one durable idea in view:

Integration service selection starts with the meaning of the communication: command, event, stream, or workflow.

Sections

  1. Integration Selection Mental Model

  2. Queues and Reliable Messaging with Service Bus

  3. Event Routing with Event Grid

  4. Streaming Ingestion with Event Hubs

  5. Workflow Orchestration with Logic Apps

  6. Integration Choice Scenario

How the Chapter Develops

The chapter develops in this order:

  1. Start by defining integration as communication contract design.

  2. Explain durable messaging for work that must be processed reliably.

  3. Explain event routing for notifying interested systems that something happened.

  4. Explain streaming ingestion for high-volume ordered signals and telemetry.

  5. Explain workflow orchestration for business processes, connectors, approvals, and visible process history.

  6. Apply the model to an order-processing platform where each integration service has a different job.

Together, these sections show that Azure integration design is about message meaning and failure behavior, not just connecting boxes.

What You Will Be Able to Do

By the end of this chapter, the reader should be able to:

  • Distinguish commands, events, streams, and workflows.

  • Explain when Azure Service Bus fits durable messaging.

  • Explain when Azure Event Grid fits event routing.

  • Explain when Azure Event Hubs fits streaming ingestion.

  • Explain when Azure Logic Apps fits workflow orchestration and enterprise connectors.

  • Combine integration services in one design without confusing their responsibilities.

Key Ideas

  • Service Bus stores work until a receiver can process it reliably.

  • Event Grid routes notifications that something happened.

  • Event Hubs ingests high-volume streams for later processing and analytics.

  • Logic Apps coordinates workflows and connectors across systems.

  • Integration design should start from communication semantics, not product names.

  • Failure behavior, retry, ordering, fan-out, and ownership shape the service choice.