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Custom business processes

Azure API Management
Azure AI Bot Service
Azure Functions
Power Apps
Power BI
Power Automate

Solution ideas

This article describes a solution idea. Your cloud architect can use this guidance to help visualize the major components for a typical implementation of this architecture. Use this article as a starting point to design a well-architected solution that aligns with your workload's specific requirements.

This example demonstrates how you can deploy portals that automate manual or paper-based processes and surface a rich user experience. Employ Azure API management and Azure Functions to connect custom APIs, which tap into your legacy systems. By using Azure-managed databases and a low-code approach to automating tasks, you can lower the overall solution costs while quickly building apps that are real-time, resilient, and scalable by default.

Architecture

Diagram that shows dataflow in airline system with Azure components.

Download a Visio file of this architecture.

Dataflow

The data flows through the solution as follows:

  1. The airline system communicates with a custom API hosted in Azure API Management.
  2. A custom API coordinator receives notifications and handles incoming messages from the airline system. It sends them to Power Apps, where flights are assigned to Microsoft Teams channels.
  3. When a user selects a flight to monitor, or when the system assigns the user to a flight, the system queues a Graph API call in an Azure Storage Account queue for further processing.
  4. Azure Functions runs the Graph API calls based on the incoming messages in the storage queue, sending notifications to Teams, and also streams all events to an Azure Event Hubs for further analytics.
  5. The airline's notification system is managed by a custom bot messaging service that employs Azure Bot Service.
  6. Custom bots send flight updates to users in Teams.
  7. An Azure Data Lake storage offers long-term retention and micro-batch processing of events from Event Hubs, ultimately generating insightful reports with Power BI.

Components

Data is loaded from these different data sources using several Azure components:

  • Power Apps: Increase agility across your organization by rapidly building low-code apps that modernize processes and solve tough challenges.
  • Azure Functions: Accelerate and simplify application development with serverless compute
  • Azure API management: Hybrid, multicloud management platform for APIs across all environments
  • Azure SQL Database: Build apps that scale with the pace of your business with managed and intelligent SQL in the cloud
  • Azure Cosmos DB: Fast NoSQL database with open APIs for any scale
  • Azure Storage: Massively scalable, secure cloud storage for your data, apps, and workloads
  • Azure Event Hubs: Simple, secure, and scalable real-time data ingestion
  • Azure Data Lake Storage: Massively scalable and secure data lake for your high-performance analytics workloads
  • Azure Bot Service: A managed service purpose-built for bot development
  • Azure Data Factory: Hybrid data integration service that simplifies ETL at scale
  • Power Automate: Streamline repetitive tasks and paperless processes
  • Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools to analyze data and share insights.

Scenario details

Potential use cases

The use of digital workflows isn't limited to any one industry. Document-based digital workflows use the same components but arrange them differently to meet the requirements of a process. Examples of industries that can benefit from automated processes include, but are not limited to:

  • Manufacturing
  • Healthcare
  • Education
  • Finance
  • Law firms
  • Airlines (aerospace)

Next steps