Start Your Integration Service Environment (ISE) Journey

I recently had the opportunity to participate in the Integrate 2019 USA Keynote where I shared some information about our production use cases with the Azure Integration Service Environment (ISE). We have talked about ISE in Serverless Tips before in the ISE scale-out article which you can read here.

After my presentation, I had a lot of people approach me about my experiences with ISE and how did we justify the initial spend? The questions are valid, just to get started with the Premium tier of ISE, you are looking at a minimum of $5263.30 USD per month and that assumes no additional data storage. While this cost is still lower than purchasing traditional middleware, buying servers and maintaining, it still is a cost that will be under some scrutinization. For us, we were able to take advantage of Microsoft preview programs that significantly reduced our initial costs, which really helped, but for these attendees those programs had already expired.

For this SKU, the pricing starts at $854.83 per month, which is a significant savings over the Premium SKU.

Source:Azure Pricing Calculator as of August 11, 2019

Now, understandably, the Developer SKU comes with reduced performance capabilities including no guarantee of reliability or scalability. But it does allow you to go through the process of setting up an ISE that connects to your VNET so you can experience the behaviors of ISE. Otherwise, you could end up building logic apps in the multi-tenant PaaS offering and then must change your logic app once you get into the ISE environment to take advantage of better on-premises connectivity and leveraging the ISE-only connectors for connecting to services within your VNET.

Conclusion

For organizations looking to explore ISE, or begin their development journey with ISE, this is the right SKU to start with at a significantly reduced price over the premium tier.