Last week we announced the retirement of Integration Service Environment – ISE. This service infrastructure had a dependency on the Classic Cloud Services, which is being retired at the end of August 2024. ISE will retire at the same date. As we know you might have some questions, here is a list of the most common questions related to this topic.
When is ISE retiring?
Retirement will happen on 31 August 2024. You must have your workloads migrated off ISE instances by that date. Existing instances will be supported during this transition period.
What happens after 31 August 2024?
After 31 August 2024, customers will no longer have access to their deployed ISE instances. Any workflows that are running on those instances will no longer be executed and any run history associate to those workflows will also be removed. Any integration account associated to an ISE instance will also be removed.
What if I need to create new ISE instances?
After 1st November 2022, we will stop the creation of new ISE instances. Customers that already have ISE environments available on their instances and have a need to tear down and recreate ISE environments, can open a support ticket to have their subscriptions added to an exception list, so they continue their day-to-day operations until the migration is completed. Our recommendation is for new integration workloads to be designed based on Logic Apps Standard.
Notice that if you have an existing ISE environment, you will still be able to deploy logic apps on that environment until you finally decommission it.
Why there is not silent migration option for ISE?
As mentioned previously, ISE infrastructure has a dependency on the Classic Cloud Services, one of the original compute resources from Azure.
With the retirement of this legacy technology, the team explored first a transparent infrastructure migration but soon realized that this wouldn’t be feasible, as it would still require a lot of work from the customers, due to the interdependencies between the infrastructure and the associated VNET that ISE are connected to. The alternative was to support a re-platform of the ISE instances, migrating ISE to Logic Apps Standard.
Does the retirement also affect Logic Apps Consumption? Are you retiring Logic Apps Consumption?
The retirement of Integration Services Environment does not impact Logic Apps Consumption. Logic Apps Consumption transition to the Classic Cloud Services replacement is already completed, with customers being migrated to the new hardware seamlessly, since the engine was fully under our control and there were no external dependencies that would impact this migration. So, there are no plans to retire Logic Apps Consumption SKU.
What are the benefits of Logic Apps Standard for me as an ISE customer?
Logic Apps Standard brings long term benefits for ISE Customers:
- First and foremost, it aligns logic apps workflows used at enterprise level, especially those have compute or network isolation requirements, to the larger application PaaS ecosystem. As Logic Apps Standard runs on top of App Services, it leverages from the improvements that are implemented to the larger application ecosystem.
- Same level of connector execution isolation provided by ISE connectors, thanks to built-in connectors, which run as part of the workflow runtime engine, and provides the same level of network connectivity and on-premises access available with ISE connectors.
- Logic Apps Standard share the same granular and elastic scaling that other PaaS tools based on App Services provide. You can define a rich scaling profile, that reacts fast to increase in load and scales down once the load returns to normal values. This fast reaction to changes in demand can lead to cost improvements. As ISE scale units can take up to 30 minutes to be provisioned, in many cases customers would have one or more units provisioned, increasing the total cost of the solution. This previous blog post from our team shows how fast logic apps standard can scale out to support bursts in workloads.
- Logic Apps Standard provides a new development experience, supporting local development, including local execution, debugging, and improved support for source control and automated deployment. With the new application structure, where a group of workflows can be deployed as a single unit in a Logic Apps Standard app, you can also fully separate infrastructure deployment from code logic. This allows for faster deployment cycles, since you don’t need to deploy the infrastructure with every code commit, while still mapping changes in infrastructure to a particular version of the code.
How can I migrate my workloads?
The latest version of the Logic Apps Standard extension in VS Code has a new feature that allow customers to export workflows from ISE instances to a Logic Apps Standard VS Code project.
This experience allows customers to group ISE workflows that should be deployed together as Logic Apps Standard application, validates the workflows against the export logic – guaranteeing that workflows, once export, work successfully in the new platform, and generates a local VS Code project, allowing users to test the code locally before packaging them for deployment. For more details this export features, including a walkthrough and known issues, access the Microsoft Learn documentation.
What about connectors? When will Built-in connectors reach parity to ISE connectors?
Logic Apps Standard Built In connectors are quickly closing the parity gap with ISE connectors. The diagram below represents the plan for closing this gap, by March 2023:
The public roadmap for Built-in connectors is available here. This is the best place to provide feedback and ask connector related questions.
As built-in connectors are available in Logic Apps Standard, the export tool will implement the conversion between ISE and built-in connectors. You can find more details about in the export tool documentation.
In addition to ISE to Built-in connectors conversion, the Export Tool also support all Azure Managed connectors available - exporting the action and the associated connection configuration, as well as creating an ARM Template for deployment of a new Azure connection on your destination subscription.
What did we miss?
Do you have questions about this ISE retirement that are not answered by the list above? We have a thread on Microsoft Q&A to discuss ISE retirement. You can add your questions there, or just use the comments section. We will keep updating this document as other frequently asked questions appears.