Azure Data Factory vs Logic Apps

Customers often ask, should I use Logic Apps or Data Factory for this? Of course, the answer I give is the same as with most technology, it depends. What is the business use case we’re talking about?

Logic Apps can help you simplify how you build automated, scalable workflows that integrate apps and data across cloud and on premises services. Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based data integration service that allows you to create data driven workflows in the cloud for orchestrating and automating data movement and data transformation. Similar definitions, so that probably didn’t help at all, right?

Let me try to clear up some confusion. There are some situations where the best-case scenario is to use both, so where a feature is lacking in Data Factory but can be found in Logic Apps since it’s been around longer. A great use case is alerting and notifications, for instance. You can use the web API out of Data Factory and send a notification through a Logic App via email back to a user to say a job has competed or failed.

To answer the question of why I would use one over the other, I’d say it comes down to how much data we’re moving and how much transformation we need to do on that data to make it ready for consumption. Are we reporting on it, putting it in Azure Data Warehouse, building some facts and dimensions and creating our enterprise data warehouse then reporting off of that with Power BI? This would all require a decent amount of heavy lifting. I would not suggest a Logic App for that.

If you’re monitoring a folder on-prem or in OneDrive and you’re looking to see when files get posted there and you want to simply move that file to another location or send a notification about an action on the file, this a great use case for a Logic App.

However, the real sweet spot is when you can use them together, as it helps you maximize cost efficiency. Depending on what the operation is, it can be more or less expensive depending upon whether you’re using Data Factory or Logic Apps.

You can also make your operations more efficient. Utilize the power of Azure Data Factory with its SSIS integration runtimes and feature sets that include things like Data Bricks and the HDInsight clusters, where you can process huge amounts of data with massively parallel processing. Or use your Hadoop file stores for reporting off structured, unstructured or semi-structured data. But Logic Apps can help you enhance the process.

Clear as mud, right? Hopefully I was able to break it down a bit better. To put it in simple terms: when you think about Logic Apps, think about business applications, when you think about Azure Data Factory, think about moving data, especially large data sets, and transforming the data and building data warehouses.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic or any Azure related topic or product, you’re in the right place. We love teaching people all there is know and the advantages of Azure. Click the link below or contact us—we’re here to help.