This is a cross post from the Integration Playbook
Since Microsoft launched Logic Apps a few years ago it has been pretty successful. There has been a lot of adoption and customers have solved some good business problems and have been able to be much more agile than they have previously been with Microsoft Integration technologies.
I think in terms of development of Logic Apps we have seen great traction in the following areas:
- Customers building Enterprise Integration solutions
- Customers building smaller one off integration solutions
- IT Pro’s wanting to develop automation solutions
I think its really interesting to see how much IT Pros have embraced Logic Apps using the Low-Code workflow to orchestrate scripts and API’s to drive devops scenarios is really cool.
I think while there has been all of this success, there are a lot of developers out there who have not considered Logic Apps for their solutions for a variety of reasons and I think the new things introduced by Microsoft in the Logic Apps space is intended to take Logic Apps from niche use cases to very wide adoption and I think this is an aggressive move and it makes a lot of sense.
Adoption Blockers
If we think about some of the adoption blockers which have limited the growth of Logic Apps I would probably list them as:
- Customers want to deploy Logic Apps on premise
- Customers want to deploy Logic Apps in other cloud provides
- BizTalk customers need a solution to run Logic Apps on premise to migrate BizTalk to Azure Integration Services
- Logic Apps struggles at present to achieve the low latency targets needed for some customer use cases
- Other types of developer do not really think about Logic Apps as being something they would use in their scenario
Primary Aims
If we consider some of the primary drivers that the product team want to achieve then I would list them as:
- Make Logic Apps a key option that all developers consider as a viable component in their solution
- Make logic apps a viable alternative to let BizTalk customers migrate to Azure Integration Services
If they achieve both of those aims then Logic Apps will be very successful!
If we take a tangent for a second and consider how the Power Platform has exploded in growth of adoption through the ability to build low code solutions then Microsoft positioning Logic Apps as a low code flavour of Azure Functions would be a very compelling proposition. We already know that functions are awesome but imagine all of the great things about functions combined with the ability to use connectors and drag and drop to abstract yourself from the plumbing code and to focus on solving business problems. I mean which business wouldn’t want that!
Summary
I think Microsoft being successful in making Logic Apps “mainstream” rather than niche would ensure that the product got the significant investment from Microsoft that the integration space has somewhat lacked for a few years. It was always the case that the number of customers always meant that integration was seen as the poor cousin of SQL Server or other products. We all know that products like functions get a lot of love in the Azure area and if the extensions to Logic Apps offer a low code offering on top of functions then the gain in customers for functions and Logic apps could be significant and help us build awesome solutions for customers.
Hopefully this article provides some useful thoughts on why I think Microsoft are extending the Logic Apps offering. In a future article I will discuss my thoughts on how to explain the changes.
