Basic Interview Questions and Answers for Azure Logic Apps

1.       What is Azure Logic Apps?

Azure Logic Apps is a cloud service that helps you schedule, automate, and orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows when you need to integrate apps, data, systems, and services across enterprises or organizations.

Logic Apps simplifies how you design and build scalable solutions for app integration, data integration, system integration, enterprise application integration (EAI), and business-to-business (B2B) communication, whether in the cloud, on premises, or both.

For example, here are just a few workloads you can automate with logic apps:

·         Process and route orders across on-premises systems and cloud services.

·         Send email notifications with Office 365 when events happen in various systems, apps, and services.

·         Move uploaded files from an SFTP or FTP server to Azure Storage.

·         Monitor tweets for a specific subject, analyze the sentiment, and create alerts or tasks for items that need review.

2.       How can we build enterprise integration solutions with Azure Logic Apps ?

To build enterprise integration solutions with Azure Logic Apps, you can choose from a growing gallery with hundreds of ready-to-use connectors, which include services such as Azure Service Bus, Azure Functions, Azure Storage, SQL Server, Office 365, Dynamics, Salesforce, BizTalk, SAP, Oracle DB, file shares, and more. Connectors provide triggers, actions, or both for creating logic apps that securely access and process data in real time.

3.       How does Logic Apps work?

Every logic app workflow starts with a trigger, which fires when a specific event happens, or when new available data meets specific criteria. Many triggers provided by the connectors in Logic Apps include basic scheduling capabilities so that you can set up how regularly your workloads run. For more complex scheduling or advanced recurrences, you can use a Recurrence trigger as the first step in any workflow.

Each time that the trigger fires, the Logic Apps engine creates a logic app instance that runs the actions in the workflow. These actions can also include data conversions and flow controls, such as conditional statements, switch statements, loops, and branching.

4.       How can we build logic Apps?

You can build your logic apps visually with the Logic Apps Designer, which is available in the Azure portal through your browser and in Visual Studio.

For more custom logic apps, you can create or edit logic app definitions in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) by working in the "code view" editor. You can also use Azure PowerShell commands and Azure Resource Manager templates for select tasks.

5.       Why use Logic Apps?

With businesses moving toward digitization, logic apps help you connect legacy, modern, and cutting-edge systems more easily and quickly by providing prebuilt APIs as Microsoft-managed connectors. That way, you can focus on your apps' business logic and functionality. You don't have to worry about building, hosting, scaling, managing, maintaining, and monitoring your apps. Logic Apps handles these concerns for you. Plus, you pay only for what you use based on a consumption pricing model.

Here are more details about the capabilities and benefits that you get with Logic Apps:

·         Visually build workflows with easy-to-use tools

·         Get started faster with logic app templates

·         Connect disparate systems across different environments

·         First-class support for enterprise integration and B2B scenarios

·         Write once, reuse often

·         Built-in extensibility

·         Pay only for what you use

6.       What are the important key terms in logic Apps?

·         Workflow: Visualize, design, build, automate, and deploy business processes as series of steps.

·         Managed connectors: Your logic apps need access to data, services, and systems. You can use prebuilt Microsoft-managed connectors that are designed to connect, access, and work with your data. See Connectors for Azure Logic Apps.

·         Triggers: Many Microsoft-managed connectors provide triggers that fire when events or new data meet specified conditions. For example, an event might be getting an email or detecting changes in your Azure Storage account. Each time the trigger fires, the Logic Apps engine creates a new logic app instance that runs the workflow.

·         Actions: Actions are all the steps that happen after the trigger. Each action usually maps to an operation that's defined by a managed connector, custom API, or custom connector.

·         Enterprise Integration Pack: For more advanced integration scenarios, Logic Apps includes capabilities from BizTalk Server. The Enterprise Integration Pack provides connectors that help logic apps easily perform validation, transformation, and more.

7.       What are connectors in logic Apps?

A connector is a proxy or a wrapper around an API that allows the underlying service to talk to Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Power Apps, and Azure Logic Apps. It provides a way for users to connect their accounts and leverage a set of pre-built actions and triggers to build their apps and workflows.

8.       What are the components of a Connector?

Each connector offers a set of operations classified as 'Actions' and 'Triggers'. Once you connect to the underlying service, these operations can be easily leveraged within your apps and workflows.

Actions

Actions are changes directed by a user. For example, you would use an action to look up, write, update, or delete data in a SQL database. All actions directly map to operations defined in the Swagger.

Triggers

Several connectors provide triggers that can notify your app when specific events occur. For example, the FTP connector has the OnUpdatedFile trigger. You can build either a Logic App or a flow that listens to this trigger and performs an action whenever the trigger fires.

9.       How many types of trigger are available?

There are three types of triggers.

·         Recurrence trigger: This trigger runs on a specified schedule and isn't tightly associated with a particular service or system.

·         Polling trigger: This trigger regularly polls a specific service or system based on the specified schedule, checking for new data or whether a specific event happened. If new data is available or the specific event happened, the trigger creates and runs a new instance of your logic app, which can now use the data that's passed as input.

·         Push trigger: This trigger waits and listens for new data or for an event to happen. When new data is available or when the event happens, the trigger creates and runs new instance of your logic app, which can now use the data that's passed as input.

10.   What are custom connectors?

Microsoft offer a wide variety of connectors, but sometimes you might want to call APIs, services, and systems that aren't available as prebuilt connectors. To support more tailored scenarios, you can build custom connectors with their own triggers and actions. These connectors are function-based—data is returned based on calling specific functions in the underlying service.

11.   What type of connectors are available in logic Apps?

Connectors are available either as built-in triggers and actions or as managed connectors:

·         Built-ins: These built-in triggers and actions are "native" to Azure Logic Apps and help you create logic apps that run on custom schedules, communicate with other endpoints, receive and respond to requests, and call Azure functions, Azure API Apps (Web Apps), your own APIs managed and published with Azure API Management, and nested logic apps that can receive requests.

·         Managed connectors: Deployed and managed by Microsoft, these connectors provide triggers and actions for accessing cloud services, on-premises systems, or both, including Office 365, Azure Blob Storage, SQL Server, Dynamics, Salesforce, SharePoint, and more.

12.   How can we connect Biztalk server to logic Apps?

If you're using Microsoft BizTalk Server, your logic apps can connect to and communicate with your BizTalk Server by using the BizTalk Server on-premises connector. You can then extend or perform BizTalk-like operations in your logic apps by using the integration account connectors.

13.   Can we identify connectors in different categories?

You can also identify connectors by using these categories, although some connectors can cross multiple categories. For example, SAP is an Enterprise connector and an on-premises connector:

·         Managed API connectors:            Create logic apps that use services such as Azure Blob Storage, Office 365, Dynamics, Power BI, OneDrive, Salesforce, SharePoint Online, and many more.

·         On-premises connectors:             After you install and set up the on-premises data gateway, these connectors help your logic apps access on-premises systems such as SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Oracle DB, file shares, and others.

·         Integration account connectors:                Available when you create and pay for an integration account, these connectors transform and validate XML, encode and decode flat files, and process business-to-business (B2B) messages with AS2, EDIFACT, and X12 protocols.

14.   What are data gateway for logic apps?

Before you can connect to on-premises data sources from Azure Logic Apps, download and install the on-premises data gateway on a local computer. The gateway works as a bridge that provides quick data transfer and encryption between data sources on premises and your logic apps.

15.   what is Azure Integration Account?

Integration Account is a part of the Azure Logic Apps Enterprise Integration Pack (EIP) that is a secure, manageable and scalable container for the integration artifacts that are created. We can store maps, schemas, partners, agreements, and certificates in an Integration Account and refer them to all the Logic Apps that makes the creation of B2B processes.

16.   What is integration account connectors?

These connectors transform and validate XML, encode and decode flat files, and process business-to-business (B2B) messages with AS2, EDIFACT, and X12 protocols.