To guarantee the design of Azure Logic Apps that are not only efficient but also straightforward to understand, it is imperative to follow a set of best practices. Adhering to these guidelines is essential for developing Azure Logic Apps that are characterized by their robustness, adaptability, ease of management, and comprehensibility.

By embracing the below practices, we position ourselves to create solutions that not only meet our current requirements but are also poised to accommodate future needs, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness and sustainability of our Azure Logic Apps deployments.

Naming conventions:

It’s important to employ naming conventions that are intuitive and self-explanatory, allowing anyone working with the Logic Apps to quickly understand their purpose and function.

Connectors:

Leverage out-of-the-box connectors to enhance the efficiency of the integration process.

This allows for the seamless connection of different services without the necessity for bespoke coding and significantly reduces development time and effort, making the overall process more streamlined and cost-effective.

Use Scope:

Scope provides the capability to organize your business logic and have specific areas that you can collapse and expand whenever you need it. To make your business process easier to follow and read, you should give the scope a name that would describe the task being performed by actions inside.

Use Try-Catch-Finally scope for advanced error handling capabilities

Logical comparison functions:

In Azure Logic Apps, logical comparison functions are available for managing conditions, comparing values, and assessing different types of logic. This enables the creation of dynamic workflows tailored to criteria. Furthermore, these functions can be combined and nested to create more complex logic in your workflows.

So, if there are lots of conditions being checked for true resulting in complexity of understanding the workflow. Use logical functions in these scenarios to reduce complexity and increase performance slightly.

Custom code/scripts:

Add custom code or scripts to solve complex challenges or combine multiple repetitive steps into one action.

Use JavaScript inline code or C# scripts inline within your Azure Logic Apps workflow to do custom tasks. There is also an option to author and run .NET code from your Standard logic app workflow

Benefits:

Provides developers with the flexibility and control needed to solve the toughest integration problems
No additional service plans are required, deploy your custom code or scripts alongside your workflows

Caching:

Implementing caching could minimize the need for frequent requests to retrieve mapping or look up data. By caching data that is accessed frequently, we can enhance performance.

One possible caching solution is the Azure Redis Caching service, but it does not have a direct connector. There is an option to use Azure Functions within the logic app to access the cache.

Error handling:

Implement error handling for logic apps. This way failed requests can be handled gracefully.

Use the runAfter property on the actions to specify the predecessor action that must first finish, and the statuses permitted for that predecessor before the successor action can run.

Consider implementing try-catch or try-catch-finally statements for advanced error handling

Azure API Management:

Consider exposing Logic apps as APIs using API management for security and to enable wider adoption of APIs.

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

Also provides analytics and monitoring features that can help you track the usage and performance of your Logic Apps.

Secure Secrets and Credentials:

Use Azure Key Vault to securely store and manage any secrets like usernames, passwords, and API keys. This way you reduce the risk of accidentally leaking sensitive information and improve the overall security of your workflows.

Using Azure Managed Service Identity (MSI), you can securely authenticate your Logic Apps to other Azure resources. MSI gives your Logic App an identity in Azure, which you can use to access and authorize other resources. This way, you don’t have to store and manage credentials in your workflows, which reduces the chance of exposing or misusing them.

Secure connections:

When setting up connections between your Azure Logic Apps and external services or applications, always opt for secure communication. This ensures the data exchanged between the client and the server is encrypted and safeguards sensitive information from being intercepted or tampered with during transmission.

Also, it is crucial to secure your endpoints, as insecure ones can leave your data vulnerable to eavesdropping and security breaches.

Role-Based Access Control:

Azure RBAC plays a key role in managing access to resources within your Azure subscription. It enables you to allocate specific roles and permissions to users, groups, or applications, determining their capabilities. It’s important to restrict access to resources under the Logic Apps resource group to only those who need it, to reduce the risk of unauthorized changes or misuse of your Logic Apps. Implement this control across all environments.

Networking:

Secure your Logic App with integrated networking capabilities. By default, Logic Apps are accessible directly through the internet and can reach only internet-hosted endpoints. But for many use cases, you need to control the inbound and outbound network traffic.
Inbound Traffic (Private Endpoints):

To securely receive inbound traffic to 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 reach internet-hosted endpoints. With VNet integration, you control outbound traffic to specific destinations.

Designer responsiveness and performance:

Testing:

Write unit tests for isolated blocks of code. Check-in tests to code repository and run as part of pipelines.
Conduct tests directly in the cloud environment to ensure reliable results.
Integration Tests: Test interactions between components or services.
End-to-End Tests: Validate the functionality of the entire application. This includes infrastructure setup and flow between workflows.
Implement performance testing and load testing to evaluate the response time, throughput, and scalability of the logic flow under different scenarios and workloads.

Automated Deployment:

Automate deployments through Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment practices. This enhances the efficiency of deployment processes and ensures that applications are deployed in a consistent approach. By following these guidelines, we can create Azure Logic Apps that are not only powerful and versatile but also simple to manage and understand.

Reliability:

Enable zone redundancy to improve the resiliency of your Standard logic app. Note: You can enable availability zones only when you create Standard logic apps.

To protect from region outages, consider deploying the whole application in multiple Azure regions and then route traffic across regions.

Optimization:

To optimize your Logic App for cost and/or performance

Use the parallel option in the For_each loop to process multiple messages at once. This can significantly speed up the overall execution time if there are many messages to process.
Use the built-in functions for common data manipulation tasks, such as string, date, math, etc.
Try to minimize the amount of data that needs to be transformed. This could involve filtering out unnecessary data as early as possible in the workflow.
Avoid unnecessary actions that increase execution time.
Create reusable functions or modules for repeated transformations to make your code more maintainable and less error-prone.
Cache the results of repeated transformations to avoid redundant computations.

Performance:

Group workflows for a particular scenario into a single Logic App Standard. That way workflows share resources like CPU, memory, storage, and network, providing better performance due to their proximity

Consider using target-based scaling. It has been observed that workflows with target-based scaling enabled were able to process messages ~30% faster compared to incremental scaling. By default, Logic Apps hosted on a Standard plan have target-based scaling enabled.

Scalability:

Logic Apps Standard offers three main compute options (WS1, WS2, WS3) with varying memory and cores, plus more choices in ASEv3 for dynamic scaling. Logic App infrastructure is designed to scale dynamically to effectively handle increasing loads. 

Tips:

Distributing the Load: Each Logic App can scale independently, and distributing your load across multiple apps can significantly accelerate the scaling speed. For instance, two apps can scale to twice the number of instances in the same timeframe compared to a single app.
Dynamic Scaling: Logic Apps Standard can effectively scale to handle high throughput requirements in demanding scenarios. You can dynamically scale out during peak periods and scale back in when processing is not needed, optimizing costs while maintaining desired throughput.

Disaster Recovery:

Implement disaster recovery measures to safeguard against service disruptions or data loss. In the event of a service disruption or data loss, you can quickly recover and restore your workflows, minimizing downtime and potential business impact

Make sure all code changes and configuration changes are checked in and deployed through automated pipelines. Use Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery services to create backup copies of any additional resources not part of pipelines.

Monitoring and Alerts:

Always monitor Logic Apps for optimal performance. Once you’ve initiated a logic app workflow, you can review its run status, trigger history, and overall performance.

To improve event monitoring and debugging, it’s recommended to set up diagnostics logging via Azure Monitor logs. Create dashboards to monitor and gain deeper insights into Logic App performance and health, including response times, success rates, and error tracking.

Additionally, setting up alerts will keep you informed about any failures or issues, and these alerts can be integrated with external services such as Outlook and Microsoft Teams for broader notification coverage

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