Background
Logic Apps is a service offered by Microsoft Azure which promotes the serverless architecture design. Anyone can use Logic Apps to create, edit and deploy cloud-based integrations and workflows. It requires minimal effort in development / deployment, in comparison to other on-premise integration tools such as Microsoft BizTalk server, where the development to deployment time is very high. Microsoft is investing heavily in this new technology and introducing many connectors to suit the demands of the growing integration industry.
Logic Apps is a fully-managed service with no infrastructure requirements. The aim of this technology is to reduce the time from development to production, drastically. There are many ready made components with predefined functionality, that the developers can use to achieve desired results. This means that there is no need to write a single line of code to achieve your integration as you can use pre-defined components.
Logic Apps Consists of Four Components:
Features:
How is SolCen using this Technology?
SolCen serves one of the biggest luxury houses in the fashion industry which has businesses scattered all over the world. This stands as the perfect solution as different geographical locations have different laws in finance, taxing, employee payroll, customer data, etc.
Solcen uses Logic Apps to act as a gateway so that all requests for a particular application from the world overpasses through a common gateway and messages using Azure Blob. In addition to this, it helps in tracking all the messages – inbound and outbound. This also helps debugging, in case of any issue or error.
SolCen also uses Logic Apps to automate various business processes like email notifications, payment receipts triggering, invoice triggering, etc. API, a feature of Azure is used as a reverse proxy to route all external http requests via Logic Apps to SolCen’s in- house services. This approach enhances security and provides a robust solution for connecting in-house solutions with external APIs.
With the release of BizTalk 2016, there is a Logic Apps Connector which makes the development of very complex integration solutions possible. These solutions are purely hybrid, accessing the best out of both technologies. BizTalk has been in the integration game for a very long time now and combining it with a cloud integration platform like Logic Apps opens many opportunities. At SolCen, we have developed some very robust solutions using the hybrid solution of BizTalk and Logic Apps. While Logic Apps is fairly new and does not support large volumes or some complicated features that are supported in BizTalk, hence making it a very effective solution for simple integration solutions. The hybrid solution used at SolCen is the best example of a hybrid solution for business process automation.
Conclusion
Logic Apps is a very powerful service that allows developers and enterprises to make the most of Integration. LogicApps ready-made components and light-weight design, supported with an easy DevOps process, sets the standard for any enterprise looking to automate its services or integrate with external APIs. That being said, LogicApps is not yet powerful enough to be the main integration middleware solution for big enterprises, since these organisations have very complicated data rules that are not yet feasible to be developed in Logic Apps independently. As of now, the best approach is to use a hybrid solution using both – an on-premise solution like BizTalk and Logic Apps. Furthermore, Microsoft is frequently adding connectors to Logic Apps with the aim to make Logic Apps the best middleware technology in the market.
