Table of Content

• Azure Logic Apps
  • How Logic Apps work
  • How to start a Logic App
  • Pros and Cons of Logic Apps
• Azure Functions
• Comparing Azure Logic Apps vs Azure Function
• Terminology

Azure App Service

Azure App Service Plan Tiers

https://medium.com/@zaab_it/azure-app-service-plan-tiers-f07d5e22297a

Azure Logic Apps

Basics

• Is a service that allows you to Schedule, Automate and orchestrate tasks.
• What this really means is that you're creating workflows that represent business flows.
  • Maybe, you're scheduling an ETL.
  • Or sending an Email
  • Integrating with Sharepoint or maybe a Blob storage.
• Hence, there could be a-lot of scenarios that you would like to automate and Logic Apps allow you to do that.

"Azure Logic Apps is a cloud service that allows you to Schedule, Automate and orchestrate tasks, business processes and workflows when you want to integrate apps, systems, data, and services across your organization."

How Logic Apps work

First of all, you always have an Action; every step of Logic Apps is an Action after an Action. A basic example of an Action is an ..

• Action #1 - "HTTP Request"
• Action #2 - "Create a Blob storage & and save Request into a Blob storage"
• Action #3 - "HTTP Response is saved into a Blob storage as a file"

and so on.

So every Action has an "Input and an Output", and you can take an Output from any Action, and give it an Input to the next Action as seen above. Straightaway, you can tell that you're able to create very complex logic, and that's one of the great features of Azure Logic Apps. Now you know we've list of Actions, let's understand in the next section on how Logic Apps starts an Action?

How to start a Logic App

• First Action in a Logic App is called "Trigger"; its a specific Action that invokes the entire flow.
• This "Trigger" can be called by multiple sources. Maybe it's a web request, a scheduled based trigger, or maybe its just an O365 event, or even there is Blob storage event that there is a new file upload into Blob storage.
• Last but least, there're "200+ connectors" which you can use for integrations.

Pros and Cons of Logic Apps

Pros

• Simple to use and they're very good for infrequent tasks
• Friendly interface to create Actions/Triggers
• Powerful OOTB connectors for integration with other systems/apps/services

Cons

• Can some time be very expensive if you over use them
• Only runs in cloud, as its dependent on Microsoft-managed connectors.
• Complication documentations

Azure Functions

Pros and Cons of Azure Functions

Pros

• Azure Function can be developed, run, and debugged on developers local machines which is a big plus.

Cons

Comparing Azure Logic Apps vs Azure Function

• Azure Logic App among other things will call an Azure Function.
• Azure Logic App is a good way of orchestrating a sequence of tasks or activities and so if you know that you need to do one thing before another thing is called, and that triggers another thing being executed. All that type of orchestration will happen within Azure Logic App.
• Now if you've some custom code or some business logic perhaps written in "Java or Python", that's where typically Azure Function would come in to place. So you can write your code in Azure Function, and deploy that and then call your function with Azure Logic App.
• Logic Apps run only in cloud, as it has a dependency on Microsoft-managed connectors. As a consequence, you cannot debug, test or run Logic Apps locally. Azure Functions can be easily developed and debugged on your local workstation, which is a big plus to increase developer productivity.

Terminology