Azure Logic App Standard – Design Considerations

To ensure the design of Azure Logic Apps is not only efficient but also easy to understand, it is essential to follow a set of best practices. Adhering to these guidelines is essential to developing Azure Logic Apps that are robust, adaptable, manageable, and understandable.

By embracing the practices below, we can improve the overall efficiency and sustainability of your Azure Logic Apps deployment by creating a solution that not only meets your current needs but can accommodate future needs as well.

Naming convention:

It’s important to use an intuitive and self-explanatory naming convention so that everyone who uses Logic Apps can quickly understand its purpose and functionality.

Connector:

Increase the efficiency of your integration process by leveraging out-of-the-box connectors.

This allows you to seamlessly connect different services without custom coding and significantly reduces development time and effort, making the overall process more streamlined and cost-effective.

Scope of use:

Scopes provide the ability to organize your business logic and have specific areas that can be collapsed and expanded as needed. To make your business process easier to follow and read, you should give scopes names that describe the tasks performed by their internal operations.

Use Try-Catch-Finally scope for advanced error handling features.

Logical comparison function:

In Azure Logic Apps, you can use logical comparison functions to manage conditions, compare values, and evaluate different types of logic. This allows you to create dynamic workflows that meet your criteria. You can also combine and nest these features to create more complex logic in your workflow.

Therefore, having many conditions to check if true complicates understanding the workflow. use logical function In these scenarios, it reduces complexity and slightly improves performance.

Custom code/script:

Add custom code or scripts to solve complex problems or combine multiple repetitive steps into one task.

Perform custom tasks using JavaScript inline code or C# script inline within your Azure Logic Apps workflow. You also have the option to write and run .NET code in a standard logic app workflow.

profit:

• It gives developers the flexibility and control they need to solve their most difficult integration challenges.
• No additional service plan required. Deploy custom code or scripts with your workflow.

Caching:

Implementing caching can minimize the need for frequent requests to retrieve mappings or look up data. You can improve performance by caching frequently accessed data.

One possible caching solution is the Azure Redis Caching Service, but there is no direct connector. You have the option to access the cache using Azure Functions within your logic app.

Error handling:

Implement error handling for your logic app. This way you can handle failed requests gracefully.

Use the runAfter property of a task to specify which predecessor task must complete first and what states that predecessor task is allowed to have before the successor task runs.

For advanced error handling, consider implementing try-catch or try-catch-finally statements.

Azure API Management:

Consider using API management for security and exposing your logic app as an API to encourage broader adoption of the API.

APIM abstracts endpoints and enables caching of API responses when needed to improve performance.

It also provides analytics and monitoring features to help you track the usage and performance of Logic Apps.

Security Secrets and Credentials:

Securely store and manage secrets like usernames, passwords, and API keys with Azure Key Vault. This reduces the risk of accidentally leaking sensitive information and improves the overall security of your workflow.

Azure Managed Service Identity (MSI) lets you securely authenticate Logic Apps to other Azure resources. MSI provides your logic app with an identity that can be used to access and authorize other resources in Azure. This eliminates the need to store and manage credentials in your workflow, reducing the potential for credentials to be exposed or misused.

Secure connection:

Always choose secure communication when establishing a connection between Azure Logic Apps and an external service or application. This encrypts the data exchanged between the client and server and protects sensitive information from interception or tampering during transmission.

Additionally, protecting your endpoints is important. This is because insecure endpoints can make data vulnerable to eavesdropping and security breaches.

Role-based access control:

Azure RBAC plays an important role in managing access to resources within your Azure subscription. This allows you to assign specific roles and permissions to users, groups, or applications and determine their capabilities. It is important to reduce the risk of unauthorized modification or misuse of Logic Apps by limiting access to resources in the Logic Apps resource group to only those who need it. Implement this control across all environments.

Networking:

Secure your logic apps with integrated networking features. By default, Logic Apps are accessible directly over the Internet and can only connect to endpoints hosted on the Internet. However, many use cases require controlling inbound and outbound network traffic.
Inbound traffic (private endpoint):

To securely receive inbound traffic for your workflow, add a private endpoint for your logic app resource within your Azure virtual network.

Outbound traffic (virtual network integration):

For outbound traffic, Logic Apps Standard allows VNet integration. By default, Logic Apps can connect to internet-hosted endpoints. VNet integration allows you to control outbound traffic to specific destinations.

Designer Responsiveness and Performance:

With the latest improvements, such as slots and improved workflow enumeration to enable zero-downtime deployment, Logic App Standard users can now integrate up to 1000 workflows within a single app. This integration simplifies management of related workflows and reduces costs associated with dedicated VMs.

However, the initialization time depends on the number of existing workflows. Deploying a single workflow to an empty logic app results in minimal downtime, while deploying to a densely populated logic app (such as 500 existing workflows) can result in 5 seconds or more of unavailability. To address this issue, customers with dense logic apps can now use slot deployment to minimize downtime and keep their apps available throughout the deployment process regardless of the number of workflows.

test:

• Write unit tests for isolated blocks of code. Check in tests to a code repository and run them as part of your pipeline.
• We conduct testing directly in a cloud environment to ensure reliable results.
• Integration testing: Testing the interactions between components or services.
• End-to-end testing: Validate the functionality of the entire application. This includes setting up the infrastructure and the flow between workflows.
• Implement performance testing and load testing to evaluate response time, throughput, and scalability of your logic flows in various scenarios and workloads.

Automated Deployment:

Automate deployments through continuous integration/continuous deployment approaches. This improves the efficiency of the deployment process and ensures that applications are deployed with a consistent approach. Following these guidelines will help you create Azure Logic Apps that are powerful and versatile, as well as easy to manage and understand.

Trustworthy:

To improve the resiliency of your standard logic app, enable zone redundancy. Note: You can enable availability zones only when you create a standard logic app.

To protect against regional outages, we recommend deploying your entire application across multiple Azure regions and then routing traffic between regions.

Optimization:

To optimize your logic app for cost and/or performance

• To process multiple messages at once, use the parallel option in the For_each loop. If there are many messages to process, the overall execution time can be significantly reduced.
• Use built-in functions for common data manipulation tasks like strings, dates, math, and more.
• Minimize the amount of data that needs to be converted. This may include filtering out unnecessary data as early as possible in the workflow.
• Avoid unnecessary tasks that increase execution time.
• Make your code easier to maintain and reduce the chance of errors by creating reusable functions or modules for repeated transformations.
• Cache repeated transformation results to avoid redundant calculations.

Performance:

Group workflows for specific scenarios into a single logic app standard. This allows workflows to share resources such as CPU, memory, storage, and network, providing better performance due to proximity.

Consider using goal-based adjustments. It has been observed that workflows with target-based scaling enabled can process messages up to 30% faster compared to incremental scaling. By default, Target-Based Scaling is enabled for Logic Apps hosted on the Standard plan.

Scalability:

Logic Apps Standard offers three default compute options (WS1, WS2, and WS3) with varying memory and cores, and the additional choice of ASEv3 for dynamic scaling. Logic App infrastructure is designed to scale dynamically to effectively handle increasing load.

tip:

• Load balancing: Each logic app can scale independently, and balancing the load across multiple apps can significantly accelerate scaling speed. For example, two apps can scale out to twice the number of instances over the same period of time as a single app.
• Dynamic scaling: Logic Apps Standard can scale effectively to handle high throughput requirements in challenging scenarios. You can optimize costs while maintaining desired throughput by dynamically scaling up during peak periods and scaling down when processing is not needed.

Disaster recovery:

Implement disaster recovery measures to prevent service interruption or data loss. In the event of a service outage or data loss, you can quickly recover and restore workflows, minimizing downtime and potential business impact.

Ensure all code changes and configuration changes are checked in and deployed through automated pipelines. Use the Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery services to create backup copies of additional resources that are not part of your pipeline.

Monitoring and Alerts:

Always monitor Logic Apps for optimal performance. After you start your logic app workflow, you can review execution status, trigger history, and overall performance.

To improve event monitoring and debugging, we recommend turning on diagnostic logging through Azure Monitor logs. Create dashboards to monitor and gain deeper insight into Logic App performance and health, including response time, success rate, and error tracking.

You can also set up notifications to keep you informed of errors or issues, and these notifications can be integrated with external services such as Outlook and Microsoft Teams to provide wider notification coverage.