In this issue:
Ace Aviator of the Month
November 2026’s Ace Aviator: Steef-Jan Wiggers
What’s your role and title? What are your responsibilities?
I’m a Domain Architect Technology in the Business Change department at VGZ, one of the largest health insurers in the Netherlands. I’m responsible for defining architecture building blocks and target architectures. I also investigate which technologies can help us and what changes our IT landscape needs to support the IT capabilities VGZ requires.
Can you give us some insights into your day-to-day activities and what a typical day in your role looks like?
Each week starts on Monday with our week start, where I meet with peers on a range of architectural topics. From there, no two weeks are the same. I create target architectures for IT capabilities such as integration, cloud, artificial intelligence and, most recently, search. These building blocks describe the “what” and feed into solution architecture, which works out the “how”.
Getting to a well-defined target architecture means talking every day with peers and stakeholders across the organisation. I also make time to explore new technology hands-on, to see whether it fits our needs. I share what I find internally in what we call Business Change colleges, knowledge sessions for colleagues. And I’m in frequent contact with Microsoft, both the local team in the Netherlands and the product groups in Redmond.
What motivates and inspires you to be an active member of the Aviators/Microsoft community?
I’ve worked in integration for over 20 years. I started with BizTalk Server and today I work with Azure Integration Services. Along the way I’ve designed, built and deployed many integration solutions, on-premises, hybrid and in the cloud. I’ve always enjoyed sharing what I learn with peers, through blogging, writing books, editing for InfoQ, and speaking at user groups and conferences such as Integrate and NIS. Sharing knowledge comes back to you many times over: it has given me great opportunities, and above all many friends in the community.
Looking back, what advice do you wish you had been given earlier that you’d now share with those looking to get into STEM/technology?
Stay curious, and don’t wait until you feel like an expert to share what you know. Writing a blog post, giving a talk at a local user group, or just asking questions in the community speeds up your learning enormously and connects you with people who will help you grow. Also, learn the fundamentals well. Technologies change; integration went from BizTalk to Logic Apps. But patterns, principles and how you approach a problem last a whole career.
What has helped you grow professionally?
Curiosity about how things work. I learn by trying things out and building demos, and I read a lot: books, blogs, documentation. Attending, and later speaking at, user groups and conferences has been just as important. So has staying close to Microsoft, locally and with the product groups in Redmond. The conversations with peers and product teams have taught me as much as any technology.
If you had a magic wand that could create a feature in Logic Apps, what would it be and why?
A seamless, browser-based development experience with native GitHub integration. The designer in the browser offers the best experience for building Logic Apps, better than VS Code. But today, getting a workflow into source control means exporting it, working locally, and then pushing it. I’d love to do it all in the browser: design the Logic App, commit it straight to the repository, and let a pipeline deploy it to the other environments. That would bring the ease of the designer and proper DevOps practices together.
News from our product group
Introducing the Logic Apps local CLI: develop Standard workflows from your terminal
Microsoft has introduced a public preview Azure CLI extension for local Logic Apps Standard development. It supports project creation, connector discovery, connection configuration, runtime management, workflow validation, and execution diagnostics from the terminal. Developers can invoke commands directly, automate them in scripts, or let coding agents use them with approval. The extension complements the visual designer and existing Azure resource-management commands rather than replacing them. An accompanying Copilot skill guides schema discovery, authentication choices, validation, and execution checks, helping teams ground development and review in observable tool results instead of assumptions.
Hybrid Logic Apps – SQL as storage provider benchmarking
This benchmark examines SQL Server storage behavior under a file-triggered Hybrid Logic Apps workload in a disconnected, single-node OpenShift environment. SQL Server 2025, file storage, and the cluster share one Windows host and backing disk. Two thirty-minute tests recorded no failed runs; the one-hour dashboard showed 45,821 successful executions. SQL averaged 1.83% of host CPU capacity, while storage contention and tail latency remained important scaling considerations. The article recommends dedicated storage as volumes grow and capacity planning based on peak and tail measurements, stressing that these results describe one workload rather than a general capacity guarantee.
🆕Orchestrate Foundry Prompt and Hosted Agents with Logic Apps Automation
Logic Apps Automation can orchestrate Microsoft Foundry Prompt Agents and Hosted Agents as steps in business workflows. API calls, schedules, and connector events can trigger agents, with deterministic actions gathering inputs and validating or acting on outputs. The article distinguishes configured Prompt Agents from container-based Hosted Agents that support custom code and orchestration. Logic Apps provides branching, retries, timeouts, parallel execution, and run history around agent calls. It also outlines a migration path ahead of Foundry workflows retiring on December 1, 2026, helping teams move interactive agents into traceable, event-driven business processes.
From Form to Action: A Governed, Event-Driven AI Intake Pipeline with Azure Integration Services
This reference architecture turns document-heavy permit intake into governed, asynchronous processing with Azure Integration Services and Microsoft Foundry. API Management controls entry and model access, while Logic Apps validates, enriches, and routes submissions to Service Bus. An Azure Function uses Document Intelligence and a Foundry model before writing a case record and publishing an Event Grid event. A shared correlation ID connects intake, processing, and downstream notifications. The article emphasizes durable hand-off, explicit failure handling, controlled model consumption, and traceability, with an accompanying repository that supports offline exploration without an Azure subscription.
💲Announcing Free Grant and Pricing for Logic Apps Automation
Microsoft has announced pricing and free grants for Logic Apps Automation, currently in public preview. Monthly allowances per Azure subscription include 108,000 workflow execution-seconds, 1 GB of data retention, 1,000 Standard and 500 Enterprise managed connector calls, knowledge storage, and AI usage. One managed environment is free only for the first sixty days, unlike the recurring monthly usage grants. Usage beyond the included limits is billed separately. The article explains how teams can experiment and run initial automations within those allowances, then plan paid usage as business process and AI orchestration workloads grow.
News from our community
Logic Apps Community Day 2026: Agenda and Speakers Announced
Event by Ahmed Bayoumy and Sebastian Meyer
The agenda and speaker lineup for Logic Apps Community Day 2026 are now published, with the event taking place on December 3, 2026. This free, online community event will stream live on YouTube and is open to attendees worldwide. Eight talks combine longer sessions and lightning talks, covering AI and automation, enterprise architecture, production operations, scalability, and BizTalk migration. Q&A slots between talks provide opportunities to engage with the speakers. The official event page includes the full agenda, speaker details, and an option to add the event to a calendar.
Don’t Rebuild Your Workflows Inside Agents: Calling Azure Logic Apps from Microsoft Foundry, Securely
Post by Rob McKenna
Enterprise agents can reuse reviewed business processes rather than duplicate workflow logic inside prompts or agent code. This article demonstrates a Microsoft Foundry agent invoking a Logic Apps workflow through an OpenAPI tool, using managed identity and Entra authorization instead of SAS keys. A synthetic prior-authorization scenario combines a lookup, business-day calculation, escalation, and notification before returning a plain-language response. The approach keeps business rules in the existing workflow while separating conversational interaction from execution, providing a concrete pattern for securely exposing established integrations as agent tools.
When Liquid transform in Logic Apps doesn’t Behave like Liquid: A subtle string to integer pitfall
Post by Şahin Özdemir
Generating a date ten years ahead exposes a subtle type-conversion problem in Logic Apps Liquid transformations. The underlying DotLiquid implementation can treat a formatted year as a string, producing concatenation rather than the expected arithmetic result. Common integer-conversion techniques do not reliably resolve the issue. The article demonstrates converting through a floating-point value with the Times: 1.0 filter and applying Round before completing the calculation. This practical example helps integration developers distinguish Liquid syntax from runtime-specific behavior and avoid prolonged debugging of seemingly simple transformation logic.
Logic Apps Standard brings freedom
Post by Mikael Sand
Choosing between Logic Apps Consumption and Standard involves more than comparing per-action charges with a fixed runtime cost. This article argues that Standard allows integration design to focus on business requirements rather than minimizing transactions, particularly when built-in operations process large volumes of records. It describes greater cost predictability within runtime capacity while acknowledging additional infrastructure ownership and networking complexity. Capacity, connectivity, DNS, routing, and firewall configuration remain operational responsibilities. The comparison helps teams weigh architectural flexibility against management overhead when treating integration as a strategic platform capability.
Logic Apps and AI Agents: Building Agentic Workflows on Azure Integration Services
Post by Mirko Peters
Agentic integration design requires choosing an appropriate platform owner as well as connecting a model to business systems. This guide compares Logic Apps with Power Automate, distinguishing Azure resource management, managed identities, infrastructure templates, and monitoring from maker-oriented environments and governance. It explains agent workflow concepts and describes tools as named collections of actions with clear responsibilities. Model configuration and pricing vary by hosting plan, and some capabilities remain in preview. The discussion helps architects separate ownership, tool design, and runtime considerations before building AI-driven business processes.
Microsoft Fabric and Logic Apps Side by Side
Video by Sebastian Meyer
Connecting real-time analytics to operational workflows allows detected business events to initiate action rather than remain dashboard observations. This video demonstrates combining Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence with business processes built in Logic Apps. The accompanying post describes events arriving from coffee stores and handing relevant information to the integration platform through the Logic Apps Automation SKU. The example separates event detection on the data platform from process execution on the integration platform, illustrating how teams can connect these responsibilities without treating analytics and business automation as unrelated systems.
Getting Started Logic App Standard in Azure
Video by Stephen W. Thomas
Moving locally developed workflows into Azure requires a configured hosting environment as well as a deployment step. This fourteen-minute walkthrough demonstrates creating a Logic Apps Standard environment and deploying a local project from Visual Studio Code. It covers the Workflow Service Plan, storage, application settings, portal-based workflow creation, and connection-string management. The accompanying post also highlights removing the unused hosting plan during demo cleanup to stop further charges. The tutorial gives developers a practical sequence for taking local integration work into the cloud while considering configuration and resource lifecycle.
Azure Logic Apps Automation: A New Approach to Dynamic, AI-Powered Business Process Automation
Post by Manoj Sethuraman
Business processes involving unstructured information, changing rules, and frequent exceptions can be difficult to express as fully predefined workflows. This article introduces Logic Apps Automation as an adaptive approach combining contextual AI decisions, organizational knowledge, human involvement, and enterprise integrations. It outlines project boundaries for governance and isolation, deployable applications containing process assets, and executable workflows combining triggers and actions. The comparison with traditional deterministic automation helps architects consider where runtime flexibility is useful while retaining explicit boundaries around deployment, oversight, and integration responsibilities across business functions.
📈 Daily Exchange Rates, Zero Manual Effort: D365FO + Logic Apps
Post by Anitha Eswaran
Daily exchange-rate imports can become repetitive and error-prone when an SFTP folder retains both historical and newly delivered files. This article describes a Logic Apps integration that identifies current-day files before submitting them to Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations through an enqueue-based approach. A scheduled workflow starts after the expected delivery time, lists files with the built-in SFTP connector, and evaluates metadata to filter processing. The example demonstrates how selection and validation steps reduce repeated historical imports and unnecessary work while automating a recurring finance integration requirement.
What’s New with Logic Apps Automation
Post by Sagar Sharma
The NIS 2026 updates connect Logic Apps Automation capabilities with practical environment and subscription planning. This recap covers managed AI models, reusable templates, development-platform connectors, and orchestration of Foundry and managed agents. It separates agent construction and governance from workflow triggering and business-system integration. Pricing combines a managed-environment base fee, compute that scales to zero, and optional capabilities, alongside free allowances. The article also distinguishes announced features from roadmap items, helping integration architects assess operational ownership, environment counts, and experimentation costs before designing an automation platform.
Coders, What’s new with Low Code Logic Apps?
Post by Sagar Sharma
Integration developers need local build, test, debug, and deployment loops that work with source control and coding agents. This NIS recap examines the Logic Apps Standard SDK, which expresses workflows through typed C# and a fluent API, allowing compiler feedback to catch mistakes earlier. It also discusses the local CLI lifecycle and Connector Namespace as managed connectivity for applications and agents. The article frames these capabilities as complementary developer surfaces, helping teams combine low-code orchestration with familiar software-engineering practices while checking release details before relying on illustrative commands.
BizTalk End of Support: Logic Apps Migration Agent, Hybrid and Microsoft Migration Incentives
Post by Sagar Sharma
Planning a BizTalk migration requires more than waiting for the support deadline or converting individual artifacts. This article reviews lifecycle considerations and introduces the AI-assisted Logic Apps Migration Agent for assessing, planning, converting, validating, and deploying workloads to Standard. Three Copilot agents share a five-stage pipeline, with human approval between stages. The discussion also covers map reuse, hybrid deployment, and migration incentives. It positions tooling as an accelerator rather than a replacement for architectural judgment, helping teams structure discovery and validation around the dependencies and business behavior of an existing integration estate.