Microsoft Azure Q&A: A conversation on Azure Integration Services

Ever wondered how Azure Integration Services actually fits into a modern integration strategy? With so many organisations trying to connect cloud and legacy systems, automate processes and move towards event-driven architectures, it’s no surprise that questions keep coming up: What should we use for orchestration? When do we choose messaging over events? How do we expose APIs securely without overcomplicating everything?

In this Microsoft Azure Q&A, we’ve gathered some of the most common questions around Azure Integration Services and put them to Sam, one of Claria’s Azure experts. From Azure API Management and Logic Apps to Service Bus and Event Grid, Sam breaks down the essentials, shares practical guidance and explains how these services support scalable, resilient integrations in 2026.

Microsoft Azure Q&A with Sam: Azure Integration Services

Q. Sam, can you give me a general overview of Azure Integration Services?

A: In short, Azure Integration Services is Microsoft’s suite of cloud-based services designed to help organisations integrate applications, systems and data whether that’s across cloud, hybrid, or even multi-cloud environments.

It supports the full integration lifecycle: building connectivity, automating workflows, exposing APIs securely, enabling event-driven architectures and scaling reliably as demand changes. In 2026, it’s also increasingly aligned with the industry shift towards intelligent automation, where workflows don’t just move data, they help drive decisions and accelerate outcomes.

Q: What are the components of Azure Integration Services?

A: Well, I think the key ones that we’ve been making use of include Azure API Management, which provides an API gateway that you can expose to external systems, new clients, etc., and Azure Logic Apps, which essentially provides you a workspace to orchestrate data flows and connect other Azure tools and external components. Additionally, we use Azure Event Grid, which is an event streaming solution, and Azure Service Bus, which enables you to publish and subscribe to Service Bus topics and queues.

Each service solves a different part of the integration challenge, but the real strength comes from how well they work together, enabling patterns like API-led connectivity and event-driven design without introducing tight coupling.

Q: Are there any integration patterns or practices you follow while implementing Azure Integration Services?

A: From my experience, most of the work we do tends to lean towards API façade patterns and event-driven architecture.

Azure provides a strong set of services that allow you to decouple components cleanly, which benefits both engineering teams and the business:

• For developers, decoupling supports continuous delivery, reduces risk and isolates failures. You can evolve one service without forcing changes across the entire system.
• For clients, it provides a clean, front-facing interface that hides complexity behind stable contracts and predictable integration behaviours.

Given the amount of data processing involved in the solutions we build, reducing tight coupling and limiting unnecessary exposure to underlying complexity remains absolutely critical.

Q: What is the purpose of Azure Logic Apps and how does it differ from Azure Functions?

A: Azure Logic Apps is Azure’s cloud service for building automated workflows and orchestrating integrations across systems. In many cases, it can achieve similar outcomes to Azure Functions, but the key difference is how you design and manage the solution.

You’d typically use Azure Functions for a smaller, focused piece of logic, something code-driven that doesn’t require much orchestration. Azure Logic Apps, on the other hand, is better suited when you need to coordinate multiple steps, connect to several services, or manage more complex end-to-end processes (often involving larger payloads and multiple dependencies).

From a development perspective, one of the biggest advantages of Logic Apps is its visual designer. It’s a low-code/no-code approach where you configure actions and connectors rather than writing everything from scratch. Instead of ending up with a block of code, you get a workflow that clearly shows each step and how data moves through the process.

That workflow-first approach is also language-agnostic, which improves readability and collaboration, especially in teams where developers may work across different languages and skillsets. On top of that, Logic Apps comes with a wide range of built-in connectors for both Azure services and external platforms, which helps speed up delivery and reduce integration effort.

In 2026, Logic Apps has matured even further in terms of enterprise readiness, with improved workflow structuring, stronger operational visibility, and support for more modern integration approaches. It’s increasingly common to see Logic Apps orchestrating complex business processes, while Azure Functions handles smaller, bespoke pieces of logic within those workflows.

Q: What is Azure Functions? How does it differ from Durable Functions?

A: Azure Functions is Azure’s event-driven serverless compute platform. It’s designed for running code in response to triggers (such as HTTP requests, timers, events, or messages) and it scales automatically with demand.

The major benefit is cost efficiency: when there are no events, nothing runs and you’re not paying for idle compute.

Durable Functions, on the other hand, is an extension of Azure Functions designed for workflows that need orchestration and state management. If you need to run long-running processes, build sequences of steps, handle retries and manage branching logic, Durable Functions becomes a strong option.

It sits somewhere between pure Functions and Logic Apps in terms of orchestration capability, depending on whether you want a visual low-code experience or a code-driven approach.

Q: What is Azure API Management and what scenarios benefit most from it?

A: Azure API Management does what it says on the tin. it’s Azure’s platform for publishing, securing, monitoring and governing APIs. It acts as a gateway between consumers and backend services, whether those backends are Azure-hosted, on-premises, or running in other environments.

Key benefits include:

• Security and access control, including authentication and authorisation
• Policy-based API governance, including transformation, throttling and validation
• Analytics and monitoring, to understand usage and performance
• Scalability, as a managed service that can handle varying traffic volumes

As with other Azure services, it’s fully managed, meaning it scales automatically to handle varying volumes of traffic. API Management can also prove particularly useful if you have multiple backend services, possibly spanning various platforms. In this case, you might want to present everything that you have as a unified API to client applications. For those wanting to track the performance of their APIs, the analytics and insights functionalities that I mentioned previously are very handy.

In our work at Claria, we often integrate existing APIs into API Management specifically to take advantage of its security controls, central governance and operational visibility without having to redesign the underlying systems.

Q: What is Azure Service Bus? Why is it good for handling large volumes of data?

A: Azure Service Bus is Microsoft’s enterprise message broker. It supports messaging through both:

• Queues (point-to-point messaging)
• Topics and subscriptions (publish/subscribe messaging)

One of the key strengths of Service Bus is reliability. It’s designed for enterprise-grade messaging where you need predictable delivery, resilience to failures and control over processing behaviour.

It supports patterns such as:

• Guaranteed message delivery
• Dead-letter queues for failed messages
• Message ordering (where required)
• Retry strategies and message handling controls

That reliability becomes essential when designing solutions that process large volumes of messages, especially when systems need to remain stable under load or during partial outages.

Q: How does Azure Event Grid help with building event-driven architectures?

A: Event Grid is Azure’s event routing service. It provides a scalable way to publish events and deliver them to multiple consumers, whether those are Azure services like Logic Apps and Azure Functions, external services, or customer applications.

Its biggest value is that it supports decoupling: you can publish an event without needing to know who consumes it or how many subscribers there are.

In many of the projects we’ve delivered at Claria, this has been crucial. We often have multiple services that need to react to a single event and Event Grid makes that easy to manage without hardwiring dependencies between systems.

Azure Q&A: Conclusion

As Sam explained in this Q&A, Azure Integration Services gives teams a practical way to connect systems, automate processes and design architectures that don’t fall apart the moment something changes. With services like API Management, Logic Apps, Service Bus and Event Grid, organisations can build integration layers that are easier to govern, easier to scale, and far easier to maintain over time.

If you’re currently dealing with fragmented systems, manual workarounds, or integrations that have become difficult to change, we can help you take control of it. Get in touch with us to talk through your integration challenges and we’ll help you shape an Azure approach that fits your platform, your pace, and your priorities.

We hope this Azure Q&A session with Sam has been helpful for anyone exploring Azure Integration Services.

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