Adventures with Power Automate: I See Your Logic App and Raise You a Power Automate Flow!

A peer and friend of mine, Jordan Bean, wrote a blog on How to start/stop Azure Container Apps using Logic Apps – Jordan Bean Dev Blog.

His challenge?

I have a few demo apps running in Azure Container Apps. Container Apps are a great platform for getting “just enough Kubernetes”.

However, when I’m not doing a demo, I don’t want to be charged for the Container Apps running. I wanted to automate starting and stopping Container Apps.

– Jordan Bean, How to start/stop Azure Container Apps using Logic Apps

In his blog he creates a Logic App to do this.

Since Power Automate is built on Logic Apps, see Power Automate vs Logic Apps | Microsoft Learn, I figured I should be able to do this in Power Automate, so I gave it a try.

I followed his same workflow:

1. When a HTTP request is received
2. List resources by resource group
3. Parse JSON
4. For each
5. Compose
6. Invoke resource operation

And in no time, had a working Power Automate flow that did the exact same thing.

It does make use of the Azure Resource Manager – Connectors | Microsoft Learn connector, which in the Power Platform, is considered a Premium Connector, which will require licensing.

This begs the question, is there any benefit to doing it as a Logic App or Power Automate?

Not really.

The cost is minimal, as mentioned before, the Power Automate flow will require a Premium License, while the Logic App itself might not cost anything, depending on how it is setup. If the Logic App is running on a Consumption Plan, then the first 4,000 actions are included.

So, if cost isn’t the issue, then it really just comes down to what you the developer is most comfortable with and/or organizational requirements.

For me, working the past few years in the Power Platform, I would opt for building it as a Power Automate flow, where a developer more familiar with Azure, might opt to do it as a Logic App.

Download the solution at https://mattruma.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/JordanBeanDevBlogSample1Solution_1_0_0_0.zip and import it into your Power Platform environment to see it in action.

Many thanks to Jordan Bean for the inspiration!