CODEWITHSUNDEEP
azure-logic-apps
OutstandingBill
OutstandingBill

Reputation: 2882

Logic app or Web app?

I'm trying to decide whether to build a Logic App or a Web App.

It has to do things I'm quite comfortable doing in C#: receive messages in various formats (a few thousand per day), translate them, make API calls and forward them. None of the endpoints are widely used, so the out-of-the-box connectors won't be a benefit. Some require custom headers, the contents of which are calculated using a hashing algorithm. Some of the work involves converting Json into XML and vice-versa.

From what I've read, one of the key points of difference of Logic Apps are that you don't have to write any code. Since our organisation is actually quite comfortable with code, that doesn't feel like it'll actually be a benefit.

Am I missing something? Are there any compelling reasons why a Logic App would be better than a Web App in this instance?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2683

Answers (3)

Alex Gordon
Alex Gordon

Reputation: 60841

You can think of Logic Apps as an orchestrator - something that takes external pieces of functionality, and weaves a workflow together.

It has nothing to do with your requirement of "writing code" - your code can be external functions on any platform - on-prem, AWS, Azure, Zendesk, and all of your code can be connected together using Logic Apps.

Regardless of which platform you choose, you will still have cross-cutting concerns such as monitoring, logging, alerting, deployments, etc, and Logic Apps addresses very robustly all of those requirements.

Upvotes: 0

OutstandingBill
OutstandingBill

Reputation: 2882

I've decided to keep away from Logic Apps for these reasons:

  1. It is not supported outside Azure. We aren't tied to any other providers, and to use Logic Apps would break that independence.
  2. I don't know how much of the problem is readily soluble using Logic Apps. (It seems I will be solving all sorts of problems which wouldn't be problems if I was using C#. This article details some issues encountered while developing a simple process using an earlier version of Logic Apps.)
  3. Nobody has come up with an argument more compelling than the reasons I've given above (especially the first one) why we should use it, so it would be a gamble with little to gain and plenty to lose.

Upvotes: 1

Kevin Lam
Kevin Lam

Reputation: 139

Using Logic Apps has a few additional benefits over just writing code which include:

  • Out of box monitoring. For every execution you get to see exactly what happened in each step of the process with a monitoring view that replicates your Logic App design view.
  • Built in failure handling. Logic Apps will automatically retry calls on failure cases and also allows you to either customize the retry policy or have a custom retry policy with a do-until pattern.
  • Out of box alerting. You can configure alerts to inform you of failures.
  • Serverless. You don't worry about sizing or scaling and you pay by consumption.
  • Faster development. Logic Apps allows you to build out the solution faster especially as you consider that you don't have to code for monitoring views, alerting, and error handling that comes out of the box with Logic Apps.
  • Easy to extend. If you are already using a Logic App access to over a 125 connectors to various services will make it easy to add business value or making it smarter by including things like cognitive services to your workflow with very little extra effort.

Upvotes: 4

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