What is Azure Logic Apps?

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. You can use low-code-no-code tools to develop highly scalable integration solutions that support 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.

The following partial example enterprise workflow uses conditions and switches to determine the next action. Suppose you have an order system, and your workflow processes incoming orders. You want to manually review orders above a certain cost. 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 you're ready to try creating your first logic app workflow, see Get started.

To continue learning more, try this video:

For more information, visit Azure Logic Apps on the Azure website and other Azure Integration Services.

Key terms

The following table briefly defines core terminology and concepts in Azure Logic Apps.

Why use Azure Logic Apps

The Azure Logic Apps integration platform provides more than 1,000 prebuilt connectors so that 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, while spending less energy 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 natively run on the Azure Logic Apps runtime for faster performance.

To access and work with 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 more than 1,0000 connectors in a constantly expanding 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, see the following documentation:

• About connectors in Azure Logic Apps

• Built-in connectors

• Managed connectors

When you build workflows in Azure Logic Apps, you usually don't have to write any code. However, if you do need to write some code, you can add and run JavaScript code snippets or C# scripts in your workflow by using the Inline Code action for JavaScript or C#, respectively. You can also add and run code by using Azure Functions. If your workflow needs to interact with events from other Azure services, custom apps, or other solutions, you can monitor, route, and publish events by using Azure Event Grid or Azure Event Hubs.

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.

To learn how other companies improved their agility and increased focus on their core businesses when they combined Azure Logic Apps with other Azure services and Microsoft products, check out these customer stories.

How does Azure Logic Apps differ from Functions, WebJobs, and Power Automate?

All these services help you connect and bring together disparate systems. Each service has their advantages and benefits, so combining their capabilities is the best way to quickly build a scalable, full-featured integration system. For more information, see Choose between Azure Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Azure WebJobs, and Microsoft Power Automate.

How quickly can I ramp up my solutions with Azure Logic Apps?

You can start small with your current systems and services, and then grow incrementally at your own pace. When you're ready, Azure Logic Apps helps you implement and scale up to more mature integration scenarios by providing the following capabilities and benefits.

Visually create and edit workflows with easy-to-use tools

Save time and simplify complex processes by using the visual design tools in Azure Logic Apps. Create your workflows from start to finish by using the Azure Logic Apps workflow designer in the Azure portal, Visual Studio Code, or Visual Studio. Just start your workflow with a trigger, and add any number of actions from the connectors gallery.

Connect different systems across various environments

Some patterns and processes are easy to describe but hard to implement in code. Azure Logic Apps helps you seamlessly connect disparate systems across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. For example, you can connect a cloud marketing solution to an on-premises billing system, or centralize messaging across APIs and systems using Azure Service Bus. Azure Logic Apps provides a fast, reliable, and consistent way to deliver reusable and reconfigurable solutions for these scenarios.

Create and deploy to different environments

Based on your scenario, solution requirements, and desired capabilities, choose whether to create a Consumption or Standard logic app workflow. Based on this choice, the workflow runs in either multitenant Azure Logic Apps, single-tenant Azure Logic Apps, or an App Service Environment (v3). With single-tenant Azure Logic Apps, your workflows can more easily access resources protected by Azure virtual networks. If you create single tenant-based workflows using Azure Arc enabled Logic Apps, you can also run workflows in containers. For more information, see Single-tenant versus multitenant and integration service environment for Azure Logic Apps and What is Arc enabled Logic Apps?

The following table briefly summarizes differences between a Consumption and Standard logic app workflow. You'll also learn the differences between the multitenant environment, integration service environment (ISE), single-tenant environment, and App Service Environment v3 (ASEv3) for deploying, hosting, and running your logic app workflows.

First-class support for enterprise integration and B2B scenarios

Businesses and organizations electronically communicate with each other by using industry-standard but different message protocols and formats, such as EDIFACT, AS2, X12, and RosettaNet. By using the enterprise integration capabilities supported by Azure Logic Apps, you can create workflows that transform message formats used by trading partners into formats that your organization's systems can interpret and process. Azure Logic Apps handles these exchanges smoothly and securely with encryption and digital signatures. For B2B integration scenarios, Azure Logic Apps includes capabilities from BizTalk Server. To define business-to-business (B2B) artifacts, you create an integration account where you store these artifacts. After you link this account to your logic app resource, your workflow can use these B2B artifacts and exchange messages that comply with Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) standards.

For more information, see the following documentation:

• Integrate and build off Microsoft BizTalk Server, Azure Service Bus, Azure Functions, Azure API Management, and more.

• Exchange messages using EDIFACT, AS2, X12, and RosettaNet protocols.

• Process XML messages and flat files.

• Create an integration account to store and manage B2B artifacts, such as trading partners, agreements, maps, schemas, and more.

For example, if you use Microsoft BizTalk Server, your workflows can communicate with your BizTalk Server using the BizTalk Server connector. You can then run or extend BizTalk-like operations in your workflows by using integration account connectors. In the other direction, BizTalk Server can communicate with your workflows by using the Microsoft BizTalk Server Adapter for Azure Logic Apps. Learn how to set up and use the BizTalk Server Adapter in your BizTalk Server.

Write once, reuse often

Create your logic app workflows as Azure Resource Manager templates so that you can set up and automate deployments across multiple environments and regions.

Built-in extensibility

If no suitable connector is available to run the code you want, you can create and run code snippets from your workflow by using the Inline Code action for JavaScript or C# scripts, you can use Azure Functions. You can also create APIs and custom connectors that you can call from your workflows.

Direct access to resources in Azure virtual networks

Logic app workflows can access secured resources such as virtual machines, other services, and systems that are inside an Azure virtual network when you use either Azure Logic Apps (Standard) or an integration service environment (ISE). Both Azure Logic Apps (Standard) and an ISE are instances of Azure Logic Apps that use dedicated resources and run separately from global multitenant Azure Logic Apps.

Hosting and running logic app workflows in your own dedicated instance helps reduce the impact that other Azure tenants might have on app performance, also known as the "noisy neighbors" effect.

Azure Logic Apps (Standard) and an ISE also provide the following benefits:

• Your own static IP addresses, which are separate from the static IP addresses that logic apps share in multitenant Azure Logic Apps. You can also set up a single public, static, and predictable outbound IP address to communicate with destination systems. That way, you don't have to set up extra firewall openings at those destination systems for each ISE.

• Increased limits on run duration, storage retention, throughput, HTTP request and response timeouts, message sizes, and custom connector requests. For more information, review Limits and configuration for Azure Logic Apps.

When you create an ISE, Azure injects or deploys that ISE into your Azure virtual network. You can then use this ISE as the location for the logic apps and integration accounts that need access. For more information about creating an ISE, review Connect to Azure virtual networks from Azure Logic Apps.

How logic apps work

A logic app workflow always starts with a single trigger. The 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.

Azure Logic Apps implements and uses the "at-least-once" message delivery semantic. Rarely does the service deliver a message more than one time, but no messages are lost. If your business doesn't handle or can't handle duplicate messages, you need to implement idempotence, which is the capability to accept identical or duplicate messages, while preserving data integrity and system stability. That way, repeats of the same operation don't change the result after the first execution.

The following section describes the logic for the example enterprise workflow, which is part of an order system where the workflow processes incoming orders. The workflow already has steps that determine how much an incoming order costs. Your goal is to manually review orders above a certain cost, 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.

You can visually create workflows using the Azure Logic Apps workflow designer in the Azure portal, Visual Studio Code, or Visual Studio. Each workflow also has an underlying definition that uses JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. If you prefer, you can edit workflows by changing this JSON definition. For some creation and management tasks, Azure Logic Apps provides Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI command support. For automated deployment, Azure Logic Apps supports Azure Resource Manager templates.

Pricing options

Each logic app resource type (multitenant, single-tenant, App Service Environment (ASE v3), integration service environment), has a different pricing model. For example, multitenant Consumption logic app workflows follow the Consumption pricing model, while single-tenant Standard logic app workflows follow the Standard pricing model. Learn more about pricing and metering for Azure Logic Apps.

Get started

Before you can start with Azure Logic Apps, you need an Azure subscription. If you don't have a subscription, sign up for a free Azure account.

When you're ready, try one or more of the following quickstart guides for Azure Logic Apps:

• Create a multitenant Consumption logic app workflow in the Azure portal

• Create a multitenant Consumption logic app workflow in Visual Studio

• Create a multitenant Consumption logic app workflow in Visual Studio Code

You might also want to explore other quickstart guides for Azure Logic Apps:

• Create a multitenant Consumption logic app workflow using an ARM template

• Create a multitenant Consumption logic app workflow using the Azure CLI

Next steps

• Quickstart: Create an example Consumption logic app workflow in multitenant Azure Logic Apps in the Azure portal