Microsoft Dataverse Azure Solutions overview

  • 10 minutes

Because Microsoft Dataverse is built as part of the robust Microsoft Power Platform, it provides numerous capabilities to facilitate integration with Microsoft Azure solutions. This lesson covers some of the standard integration practices regarding Azure solutions and how they pertain to Dataverse.

Comparing Azure's integration solutions

Azure comes with a variety of other solutions, which can also be integrated with Dataverse. The following sections provide a summary of each solution. However, this module will limit further education in future lessons to the solutions that have pre-configured utilities within Dataverse that help streamline your integrations, such as Microsoft Azure Service Bus, Microsoft Azure Event Hubs, and Microsoft Azure Logic Apps.

Logic Apps

Azure Logic Apps provides a robust visual interface in which you can orchestrate complex integrations across your various environments. It has many of the same capabilities as Microsoft Power Automate workflows, so if you are familiar with preparing workflows in that context, you should be able to recognize their similarities. Both provide the ability to use pre-built and custom-built connectors, which you can use to connect to whichever system is needed. Most importantly, Logic Apps comes with a Microsoft Dataverse connector that will allow you to trigger actions based on various Dataverse events (such as a record being created or updated).

Azure Service Bus

Azure Service Bus is Microsoft's cloud messaging as a service (MaaS) platform. Messages are sent to and received from queues for point-to-point communications. Service Bus also provides a publish-subscribe mechanism that uses its Topics feature, which will not be covered in this module.

Azure API Management

Because API needs are handled by Dataverse Web API, and because Dataverse provides a role-based security model that can handle most integration scenarios, you might not need to consider Microsoft Azure API Management often. However, if you ever need to write a custom and/or proprietary API to sit on top of the Dataverse Web API, you could use Azure's API Management services.

Event Grid

Microsoft Azure Event Grid is an event-driven, publish-subscribe framework that allows you to handle various events. While Dataverse does not provide out-of-the-box capabilities to integrate with an Event Grid instance as it does with Service Bus or Event Hubs, it is a viable item to consider when you are in need of event-driven integrations.

Event Hubs

Azure Event Hubs is Microsoft's version of Apache Kafka and provides a real-time data ingestion service that supports millions of events per second. This service is good for large streams of data that need to be ingested in real time (which might occur when you are trying to capture items like application telemetry within a business application) but are not common in most business application integration scenarios. Technically, Event Hubs is not seen as an integration solution in Azure (it's seen as an analytics solution given that its predominant applications are with "big data"). Dataverse provides a utility to publish events to an Event Hub. In the context of Dataverse, while provided as an endpoint, Azure Service Bus traditionally becomes the preferred method for integration of actual business data because it comes with far less overhead.

Choosing the right Azure integration solution

If you're struggling to figure out which Azure integration solution best suits your needs, consider the information in the following table.

IF YOU WANT TO... USE THIS
Create workflows and orchestrate business processes to connect hundreds of services in the cloud and on-premises. Logic Apps
Connect on-premises and cloud-based applications and services to implement messaging workflows Service Bus
Publish your APIs for internal and external developers to use when connecting to backend systems that are hosted anywhere. API Management
Connect supported Azure and third-party services by using a fully managed event-routing service with a publish-subscribe model that simplifies event-based app development. Event Grid
Continuously ingest data in real time from up to hundreds of thousands of sources and stream a million events per second. Event Hubs

For in-depth guidance on Azure's broader Integration Services framework, refer to the Azure Integration Services whitepaper, which is found here.

Another article to reference is one found on the Azure website: Choose between Azure messaging services - Event Grid, Event Hubs, and Service Bus.