

9 Fantastic Reasons For Using Azure Logic Apps

Has someone ever asked you a question about what Azure Logic Apps is and what the benefits of it being used in your company are? Maybe they wanted to get an idea from you or possibly invite you to attend a meeting on discussing possible solutions in the Azure cloud space using Logic Apps. Although you have an had an idea of what Logic Apps are, you might have struggled to give a clear answer.

Imagine now if you were able to give some answers and give some insight on this.  Well, I’m going to give you 9 reasons using Azure Logic Apps would be fantastic for your company’s enterprise solutions.

  1. Azure native capabilities.  

One native capability is that Logic Apps has auditing.   You will be able to track all operations that happen.  You will know who has modified or deleted a resource.  Basically, you will be able to track who has done what and when to your services as they are running.

Another is that it has role based access control.  With this, you can grant people specific access to just the components they need to work on or lock it down for a developer to just modify a single component.

It also includes a deployment lifecycle with resource manager.  You will not need to write custom scripts or custom deployment capabilities in order to deliver an app in Azure as you will be able to use the built in capabilities in Visual Studio to deploy as one unit.  You will essentially be able to manage the deployments life cycle of your app services.

The last native capability, is that it has API management and PowerShell capability.  It has full REST API and PowerShell support.  This will allow you to run things programmatically from the command line.  It will also allow you script out the creation and deletion of Azure resources.

  1. It is easy

Logic apps have a no code designer for rapid application creation.  It will give you an easy way, without writing code, to do integration in the cloud and automate it.  No need to go through hours or days to get setup.   With a simple user interface, it should help you to get started in a matter of minutes.  This simplification should help broaden the user base and make more people willing to use Azure.

Logic Apps will also allow you to consume custom and reusable APIs more easily.

Logic Apps also has a lot of pre-built templates and recipes that you can use.

It has support of popular SaaS APIs and on premises APIs.   For more complex or advanced integration scenarios, you still have the option to use more advanced APIs, like BizTalk Services.

In addition, you have the option to use your own custom APIs.  With this, you can build your own custom APIs and integrate them with Logic Apps.  If you have your own interfaces and your own internal systems that you want to use, you can do that using API apps as the API connectors give you a bridge into any legacy apps so you don’t have to move all of it to cloud.

With Azure, everything with your Logic App is hosted and managed on your behalf for you.  You would only have to worry about managing the code you want to write yourself.

  1. It can scale

Being on Azure, you will be able to grow to meet the demand of your clients and customers.  You will be able to deliver apps at massive scale from having tens to millions of concurrent users at the same time.  With all this, you will be able to engage your customers at scale

  1. It’s built for fast and agile development

You will have delivery of your code that is easier and faster for your end users.  They will get quick updates of your code in the cloud, which will help in the transformation your business for the better.

  1. Having insight

You will be able to receive insight into what is happening with your application.  This will allow you to cater your business solution based on the insight you get on what is happening with your data.  This insight will also help empower your employees.

  1. It aims to fill the gaps with BizTalk

Logic Apps is built to have a much easier learning curve than BizTalk.  It also aims to give new capabilities with managed and custom APIs.

With Logic Apps, you can just use the BizTalk components you need and not have to install all of BizTalk to use these components.

Microsoft’s strategy for BizTalk is to break apart the gigantic task that you don’t have to build and deploy the entire software suite.  By having individual APIs, you install only what you need.  For example, you can just use the xml validator API and/or transform API in your Logic App and no need to stand up an entire BizTalk environment for this capability.

  1. You can still build BizTalk like solutions

A Logic App is essentially a workflow, which is like an orchestration.   The API connectors, are like the orchestration shapes.   You can create simple workflows in Logic Apps and for more difficult scenarios, you can still use the BizTalk services.  Workflow is now a top down design (as opposed to left to right up until February).

With Logic Apps, you can have implicit/explicit conditions, repeating and conditionals capabilities.

  1. It is meta data driven

All these capabilities with the APIs are metadata driven.  You will not have to build any custom user interfaces for these API connectors.  You will expose metadata in a format using Swagger.   The Swagger defines a set of actions/capabilities, what inputs it takes and the type information.

  1. It has a simplified Workflow definition.

All Logic Apps have only 4 main parts (parameters, triggers, actions, outputs).

Parameters are things that you want to reuse across workflows.  Re-using values or even complex objects throughout the definition makes it easier to comprehend.  Separate out configuration from the definition itself makes sharing easy as well as across different environments.

Triggers are what start the Logic App.  Triggers can be evaluated at recurring intervals or have it’s state maintained across executions.

Actions are the things that happen in a Logic App.  Actions can depend on other actions.  The dependencies are what will determine the order of the Actions executing.   State is also maintained across executions.

Outputs are what gets sent from calls into workflow.

I hope that I have given you some fantastic reasons on Microsoft’s Azure Logic Apps and why it might be right for your company.  As you can see, it is not always a simple straight answer to what might seem like a simple question or questions.  If you have already had some experience with Logic Apps, let me know your experiences with it and what you think of Logic Apps.