Vinnarason James is an experienced Cloud and Integration Architect and DevOps consultant helping organizations define and set up their Azure and Integration platform. He has significant experience working with integration platforms both on-premises and cloud. He is passionate about learning emerging cloud technologies and automation.
Initially, integration solutions were built using Microsoft BizTalk, totally on-premises. Gradually the emerging cloud technologies started coming out, like Salesforce and the other cloud-hosted SaaS platforms. There was a need to do integrations on the cloud technologies as well. For example, some organizations had their ERP and their old CRM systems on-premises but started adapting to Salesforce as their new CRM system. So how do they transfer data between the on-premises ERP and CRM systems to the cloud, ERP, or CRM systems? That’s where they started seeing the need for a cloud integration platform.
When initially Logic App came on board, it came as a consumption-only option. It is excellent for most small and medium organizations. The problem comes when they implement Logic App consumption for government agencies because they are keen on security. One of the main things that government agencies look for when they implement integrations is network isolation. Mostly Logic Apps consumption was not considered as one of the preferred solutions because of the lack of security controls that the government agencies demand. Microsoft introduced another version of the Logic App, which provided more security controls and tried to satisfy these government agencies’ additional security controls, demand for network isolations, and other security controls. This offering was branded as an integration service environment.
Logic App Standard and Consumption were used hand in hand when business use case demands. Government organizations choose Logic App Standards as the preferred solution. Few cases are there that cannot be solved by Logic App Standard. In such cases, they implement it using Azure Functions. Options unavailable in the standard are available in Logic App consumption; for example, own schemas can be built. Logic App Standard and Consumption will go hand in hand in these situations.
Traditionally, organizations follow a pattern where they generate a correlation ID at the start of the workflow execution. That correlation ID is used as the primary identifier for all the logs that are generated from workflows. The same thing can be done using Logic App standard and Logic App consumption by adding custom logs. The correlation ID can be used to achieve end-to-end traceability from the start of the execution to the end of the workflow.