Microsoft Azure Logic Apps was a perfect solution for us to integrate the apps and products we used in our business to create automated workflows which were also complex and very advanced. This was a very new feature for us, and also it reduced our software costs massively and also saved us a lot of time. With the crisis, we were in back then Azure turned out to be the best cost-friendly solution because we only had to pay for what we used!
BizTalk is well suited as middleware. Where you wish to translate an input file into an output file and send it to some endpoint. In our case, we used it to convert and send files to SAP. In many ways, it very flexible, and you can do almost anything you want with it. In many ways, it's a better solution than your SAP XI or PI as middleware, since it's much less expensive, and allows you do interface with non-SAP systems.
It is very user friendly. Users can change rules during run time and change workflow.
Huge capacity for queueing messages. It supports all types of adapters like Oracle, Salesforce, SMTP, FTP, etc. Also users can built custom adaptors.
If users want to dynamically deploy their solution without any downtime, this is a perfect solution. BizTalk will be a good fit, especially for public-facing websites.
Well-proven in the market. I used it when developing a website for Virgin Trains, catering more than 800K user requests per day.
Microsoft Azure should be unclouded with its pricing. We don't always know how much an inclusion will affect the monthly price. So we have to speculate where we are with the price and if we can afford to include another asset.
Azure Logic Apps on the surface are very intuitive. There is definitely room for improvement but it was very well laid out. The main thing with the UI is that its baked into Azure which at times can be a confusing platform to navigate. This is not the fault of Azure Logic Apps for the Azure platform.
As with other Microsoft Azure support, Microsoft Logic Apps is hit or miss depending on the issue you are having. If it's simple then the resolution can be very quick. If it requires an engineer to review, then it will take them quite a while to look up a solution as they dig through.
BizTalk Server has been supported for more than 15 years. It is well proven in the market. Microsoft has provided excellent support with technical issues.
This is very dependent on the line of work you are in and the unique company requirements, as is the case with everything. We utilize Azure Logic Apps for all of our computing solutions within our domain, and it has always worked flawlessly. One of the simplest clouds to set up and use is by far the most popular.
BizTalk was selected here mainly because it is easy to integrate to a .NET application (most of them are Web Service, WCF SOAP, WCF REST and Web API) and many backend databases are Microsoft SQL Server. Another benefit is that the monitoring job is easy to set up and centralize with other .NET application monitoring jobs.
Moving to Serverless Computing obviously makes the organization get rid of dependent Infra.
ROI can be seen immediately as the required infra can be decommissioned after a successful quarter run.
Being deployed as a single entity or single app on Azure Logic Apps, Organizations need to be more careful with controls applied to meet compliance and security posture.
A positive impact has been the quicker turnaround time of a part request and that part showing up in SAP using Biztalk as middleware.
A somewhat negative impact has been the somewhat insufficient error logging/message capture settings that Biztalk provide. This has caused occasional delays when attempted to create parts for the business.
A somewhat negative impact has been the need to have a specialized developer who understands Biztalk to troubleshoot issues with the Biztalk and SAP interaction when creating parts, and when adding new fields to the parts.
