Microsoft Azure Logic Apps Reviews

Microsoft Azure Logic Apps is an integration platform used for enterprise application integration and building APIs.

Azure Logic Apps has influenced cost savings by approximately seventy to eighty percent in many cases and is generally 30% to 40% cheaper than any comparable services in this space.

We host our application in Azure App Services and use Logic Apps to monitor everything within. We can schedule or trigger emails in case of any failures.

Every company needs their live transaction data in digital format. We never directly interact with the live database, regardless of the company's domain. Instead, we take snapshots of the live database, which act as separate reporting databases. It's a separate database; we call it a reporting database.

Once the data is within the reporting database, we do massaging by combining more than one table and some information to make it a beautifully presented or required report. A job is needed to do all this kind of activity. So, as a program, what we do is build a program and keep it simple. It's a console-based application at the option. Someone has to trigger that between month-end or during month-end or late at night, non-office hours, non-business hours, maybe in between.

In Logic Apps, what we do is have these kinds of applications as an EXE to be triggered at a particular point in time, period of time. Then, the final output, we want to drive it to the next level, to the block storage. So, in the storage block, we have another Logic App. It's like a chain of Logic Apps. We can train multiple applications. Once the final output is successfully maintained in another location or block storage, we use Logic Apps to trigger the application in general.

I deal with all the projects built under the .NET and .NET Core frameworks. I think Logic Apps is good for helping us run our access on a cloud environment like Azure. It's much easier, more reliable, and better to maintain. 

If the server is shut down, the app may not trigger, but Azure Logic runs in a cloud environment. So there's no point where the server is down. Even if there is downtime, we have high availability, like 99.999%. 

So, in a fraction of a second, our server can be brought up, and the Logic App can trigger and run. The failure rate of Logic Apps is very low, and the success rate is high.

Supports complex workflows:

It runs behind Azure services, on top of Azure. We have our tenant as a domain under our project subscription. Based on our license and overall requests, Logic Apps provides the best performance. You can have single or multi-chain trigger points within one Logic App function. You can also have nested ones. For example, if job one succeeds, it goes to job two; if not, it goes to job three. You can do this kind of conditional execution based on the success rate.

Keeping up with AI:

Currently, AI mostly plays with data, such as Cosmos DB and Azure Integration Apps. When a customer wants to fetch information out of this data, we can implement AI on the database side. Logic Apps are more for in-house requirements, like generating jobs, presenting jobs, generating reports, saving information into databases, or saving information into block storage. It's a triggering point where manual intervention is not required every time; a one-time configuration is enough.

We have developed multiple integrations using the solution. We mainly used it to integrate SAP, ServiceNow, and different third-party APIs with the front end. There were different use cases for Microsoft Azure Logic Apps.

The solution provides multiple connectors, which are very useful. If we don't have a suitable connector, we can create one ourselves. With Microsoft Azure Logic Apps, we need not go into how to draft the code and how to structure the classes. We just need to focus on the logic. It's a quick solution for the coding part. It includes coding, but not that much.

The solution should include more connectors. In one of my projects, we faced issues with SAP connectivity. The connector needed to connect the SAP was not compatible with our architecture. We had to create our custom connector for that.

Microsoft Azure Logic Apps needs to be enhanced to make it more personal to the integration area. They are moving towards development but not that much towards the integration services part. It should be easier to connect to different third-party services.

Microsoft Azure Logic Apps' main use case is workflow. Depending on your needs, many available connectors allow you to configure it with different systems, whether on-premises or in the cloud. They start with a trigger and then execute steps one by one.  Just as we use features in Excel, the tool can manage different tasks and handle various data formats.

The solution's most valuable feature is the no-code/low-code feature. Due to certain restrictions, we might be unable to use some connectors, particularly if they involve sensitive information like usernames and credentials. In such cases, you could use the library. Then, you can deploy that function app to the same subscription and call it via Microsoft Azure Logic Apps.

At our company, we validate certain configurations of the Microsoft Azure Logic Apps based on the security posture and some other factors. We check how Microsoft Azure Logic Apps are deployed and whether the configuration of the solution is appropriate as per the customer needs of our organization. At our company, we also check if Microsoft Azure Logic Apps are being configured as per the standard policies. 

Our organization oversees the architecture and provides consultation on whether the configuration of Microsoft Azure Logic Apps is correct and what changes or updates are needed. The use cases of Microsoft Azure Logic Apps depend upon the application design. In our company, we overview the architecture and check the functionality. Our organization checks whether the configurations and settings of the apps using Microsoft Azure Logic Apps are properly designed or not. 

For instance, suppose there is a Logic App that is used in one of the applications, and there is a diagnostic setting. For the aforementioned app, at our company, we need to check whether the workflow, runtime and diagnostic events are logged properly. As part of the app properties, our company often check whether a connection stream is being used and whether it's summoned by the Azure Key Vault or not. 

The Logic App's designer is one of the vital features of Microsoft Azure Logic Apps. The workflows and API connections are quite systematic using the solution, and designs can be easily implemented. The Logic App's designer is automated and easy to use. 

Azure comes into the picture when the client is already using Azure and they are migrating PeopleSoft to the Oracle XCM Cloud. They wanted to utilize the existing system, as they already have Azure as a middleware. Thus, they preferred to continue with Azure rather than adopt another platform. In this scenario, we used Azure Logic Apps to transform their requests and facilitate the interaction within their cloud journey from PeopleSoft to Oracle and vice versa. 

We employed Azure Logic Apps as middleware since the client was already utilizing Azure for various platforms. We used Azure Logic Apps for integration purposes, including calling REST services, short services, transferring DB calls, and handling data load into tables based on the design. Most of our clients are already using Azure, and they tend to choose it for cost considerations as they already have licensing for Azure or AWS. So we seek solutions that can be cost-effective while integrating with other SaaS services like Oracle SaaS. That's how we handle integration in such scenarios.

There are many good features of Microsoft Azure Logic Apps, and that's why customers are using it. For instance, we have SaaS event processing, timer-based processing, data ingestion, and business process automation. 

Another essential feature is ISE (Integration Service Environment) for content-based routing, data transformation, and enrichment. These capabilities address various business use cases effectively. Azure Logic Apps provide the functionality required to achieve these scenarios.

For one of the projects that we used, this solution dealt with SharePoint and Power apps. So there, we have to do some kind of connectivity and calculations on the fly. It was related to reading a file and our heavy processing. That was one scenario. There have been a few others as well.

If we are working with a service-oriented architecture, as an architect as a baseline, it supports us very well in terms of expandability, and the kind of robustness it brings, especially with its serverless nature is fabulous. That's not a problem. So that's how we view it. It allows us to focus on a particular functionality within this context, and that's great. 

However, the challenge lies in the fact that it's often difficult for most developers to integrate it into their daily activities seamlessly. That's where it becomes problematic.