Power Platform | The Azure Services booster?

Most recently, I joined a couple of design/architecture sessions with Fusion teams focusing on bringing data & backend services effectively together and simplify access in end-to-end processes for everyone. This also included to think about improvements any AI technology for instance would add to the concept. While the teams followed the three main pillars of Fusion Teams Development to rethink how to create their next generation of collaborative processes and apps, it wasn´t the most intuitive step to add the low-code / no-code strategy to the existing development strategy. But let me explain in more detail.

First, there was a common sense in them following an API-First approach strategy in terms of offering an integration layer to their data and backend services. They did this for several years and therefore the original version of above visual in the Developer Tools would have only contained the classical Azure DevOps, Visual Studio and GitHub tools. It was also clear for them in a third pillar taking care of the collaborative aspect when creating end-to-end processes or designing apps for everyone.

Since the company though recently made significantly investments into low-code, it was time for them adding the low-code / no-code strategy as addition to the 2nd pillar and asking themselves on which tooling and governance to structure to best compose all tools and design them as an orchestrated platform.

Orchestrating Tools (not only developer ones) as a platform is a pretty easy task on paper, as you can see in the visual above, but takes a while to setup the right tools from an IT and Developer scope – specifically when it comes to automate backend deployment tasks and being offered to end-users as a self-service experience.

Nevertheless, visualizing it on paper or digitally via Power Point, provides a structure of how to proceed with an integration layer and could be the foundation of writing up a guide which tools to be used by developers when creating new assets or augmenting existing legacy applications.

A common question that pop’d up during these conversations was around what influence Power Platform may have on the company already using Azure Services. Is it driving services consumption in any ways?

Most of the times, this is where education starts and first of it’s kind we need to define and align on a couple of things. Power Platform itself is build with Azure Services. Above visual outlines some impressive numbers (well for most customers they are) around what kind of Azure Services have been used to build and run Power Platform as a SaaS offer in Microsoft Cloud regions.

Obviously, when you now ask, is this driving any service consumption on your customer side the answer to it would be, these are the backend services that are consumed the moment you deploy a Power Platform environment or using Power Platform capabilities in your default Microsoft 365 tenant. But when it comes to individual app-, automation processes-, chat- or web pages creation by using the low-code development tools, there´re a lot of Azure Services that may benefit from it.

Before outlining this in more details, let me first provide you an example in the following visual.

In this example a company was in need to create a solution for a given business problem. Business Domain Experts (knowing about low-code), Data Analysts (knowing about data visualization) and Code-first developers (knowing about Azure Services) came together to design a solution. Suprisingly, after a short time the above architectural drawing was born and outlined the future process of how the business problem solution would look like. Since them acting as Fusion Team, everyone focused on bringing-in their expertise and build their specific asset which later on was aggregated into a solution layer in Power Platform and Azure. The support these teams needed came from features like the Power Platform ALM Accelerator and Power Platform CLI. Something (in terms of the principles these tools following) already being well known by Code-first developers.

I am not going to outline how this company used the tools to setup their development environment. But given this example already showing a couple of Azure Services that typically could be found inside Fusion Teams solutions using Azure Services and Power Platform together, there might be some surprises in the following visual that shows additional Azure Services that would typically benefit from building solutions with them and you haven´t had them in mind.

In our group, we discussed and created these visuals that I am now able to share with all of you, so you can benefit from them and learn something new about the benefits of operating as Fusion Teams Development teams and further improve your company´s digital transformation journey.

An addiontional note: When asking yourself if an Azure Service benefits from using Power Platform as front-end compared to a traditional developed mobile / desktop or web-application, please take into account all five main modules of Power Platform: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Power Pages plus the „hidden champions“, such as AI-Builder, Dataverse, or the Connector Framework that allows for easy API-based integration, but also the powerful Security and Governance that consists of Azure, Microsoft 365 and Power Platform services coming together.

Hope this helps. Enjoy your pre-holiday christmas season and hope to see ya in one of the upcoming events in 2023. Until then,…