Every enterprise has integration glue: the order that must flow from the web shop to SAP, the file from a partner that must be validated, transformed, and loaded, the approval that must route through Teams before a record updates. Logic Apps is Azure’s answer, and the Standard tier turned it from a clever consumption toy into something you can run like software.

Standard vs Consumption, Decided

Consumption Logic Apps bill per action, run multi tenant, and suit spiky, low volume, non sensitive automations. Standard runs on single tenant compute (the Functions runtime underneath): predictable pricing at volume, VNet integration and private endpoints so workflows reach the private estate this series has built, multiple workflows per app sharing compute, local development in VS Code with real source control, and stateless workflows for the hot paths. For anything that is part of your production integration landscape, Standard is the answer and the rest of this post assumes it. The stateful versus stateless choice inside Standard: stateful persists every step for replay, resubmit, and long running patterns; stateless holds state in memory for dramatically lower latency and cost on high volume request response flows that finish in seconds. Use stateful by default, stateless where the volume demands it and the workflow permits it.

Connectors and the Enterprise Pack

The connector catalog is the selling point, hundreds of prebuilt operations from SAP to Salesforce to SFTP, but know the two kinds: built in connectors run inside your app’s compute (fast, VNet reachable, no per call metering), while managed connectors run in Azure’s shared connector infrastructure (broader catalog, per call billing on some plans, public endpoints unless you use the VNet supported ones). Prefer built in where both exist, Service Bus, SQL, HTTP, storage all have built in versions. Authentication follows series law: managed identity on every connector that supports it, Key Vault references for the stragglers. The Integration Account and its artifacts (schemas, maps, trading partners, EDIFACT and X12 agreements) cover the B2B world; if your business exchanges EDI with partners, this replaces a small commercial product, and XSLT maps plus XML validation actions replace another.

Error Handling Like You Mean It

The default behavior, action fails, run fails, someone maybe notices, is not a strategy. The tools: configure retry policies per action (exponential, with sane caps) for the transient failures that dominate integration work; run after conditions to build try catch shapes, a scoped block of actions with a parallel branch running only on failure that logs, compensates, and alerts; and the resubmit capability of stateful workflows for the operational save, fix the downstream system and resubmit the failed runs from the portal rather than reconstructing lost messages. For flows where messages must not vanish, front them with Service Bus and let the queue own delivery guarantees, the Logic App becoming a resilient consumer with the dead letter discipline from that post. And instrument: workflow runs to Application Insights, an alert on failure rate per workflow, and a weekly glance at the run history of your top ten flows.

Workflows as Code

Standard’s project structure is files in a repo: workflow definitions, connections, parameters, host settings. Develop locally in VS Code with the extension, run against emulators and real services, pull request like everything else, and deploy the app with your standard pipeline (it deploys like a Function app), parameterizing connections per environment. Infrastructure, the Logic App resource, plan, VNet integration, private endpoints, comes from Terraform with the rest of the estate. The result is integration that ships like software, which after two decades of ESBs configured through consoles nobody dared touch, is the whole point.

Cheers
Osama