Azure Logic App Overview
Azure Logic Apps is a cloud platform where you can create and run automated workflows with little to no code. By using the visual designer and selecting from prebuilt operations, you can quickly build a workflow that integrates and manages your apps, data, services, and systems.
Azure Logic Apps simplifies the way that you connect legacy, modern, and cutting-edge systems across cloud, on premises, and hybrid environments and provides low-code-no-code tools for you to develop highly scalable integration solutions for your enterprise and business-to-business (B2B) scenarios.
This list describes just a few example tasks, business processes, and workloads that you can automate using Azure Logic Apps:
- Schedule and send email notifications using Office 365 when a specific event happens, for example, a new file is uploaded.
- Route and process customer orders across on-premises systems and cloud services.
- Move uploaded files from an SFTP or FTP server to Azure Storage.
- Monitor tweets, analyze the sentiment, and create alerts or tasks for items that need review.
How logic apps work
In a logic app, each workflow always starts with a single trigger. A trigger fires when a condition is met, for example, when a specific event happens or when data meets specific criteria. Many triggers include scheduling capabilities that control how often your workflow runs. After the trigger fires, one or more actions run operations that process, handle, or convert data that travels through the workflow, or that advance the workflow to the next step.
The following screenshot shows part of an example enterprise workflow. This workflow uses conditions and switches to determine the next action. Let’s say you have an order system, and your workflow processes incoming orders. You want to review orders above a certain cost manually. Your workflow already has previous steps that determine how much an incoming order costs. So, you create an initial condition based on that cost value. For example:
- If the order is below a certain amount, the condition is false. So, the workflow processes the order.
- If the condition is true, the workflow sends an email for manual review. A switch determines the next step.
- If the reviewer approves, the workflow continues to process the order.
- If the reviewer escalates, the workflow sends an escalation email to get more information about the order.
- If the escalation requirements are met, the response condition is true. So, the order is processed.
- If the response condition is false, an email is sent regarding the problem.
Why use Azure Logic Apps
The Azure Logic Apps integration platform provides hundreds of prebuilt connectors so you can connect and integrate apps, data, services, and systems more easily and quickly. You can focus more on designing and implementing your solution’s business logic and functionality, not on figuring out how to access your resources.
To communicate with any service endpoint, run your own code, control your workflow structure, manipulate data, or connect to commonly used services with better performance, you can use built-in connector operations. These operations run natively on the Azure Logic Apps runtime.
To access and run operations on resources in services such as Azure, Microsoft, other external web apps and services, or on-premises systems, you can use Microsoft-managed (Azure-hosted) connector operations. Choose from hundreds of connectors in a growing Azure ecosystem, for example:
- Azure services such as Blob Storage and Service Bus
- Office 365 services such as Outlook, Excel, and SharePoint
- Database servers such as SQL and Oracle
- Enterprise systems such as SAP and IBM MQ
- File shares such as FTP and SFTP
For more information, review the following documentation:
You usually won’t have to write any code. However, if you do need to write code, you can create code snippets using Azure Functions and run that code from your workflow. You can also create code snippets that run in your workflow by using the Inline Code action. If your workflow needs to interact with events from Azure services, custom apps, or other solutions, you can monitor, route, and publish events using Azure Event Grid.
Azure Logic Apps is fully managed by Microsoft Azure, which frees you from worrying about hosting, scaling, managing, monitoring, and maintaining solutions built with these services. When you use these capabilities to create “serverless” apps and solutions, you can just focus on the business logic and functionality. These services automatically scale to meet your needs, make integrations faster, and help you build robust cloud apps using little to no code.
