📉 Problem Statement: The Fragile Spaghetti of Direct Integrations
As organisations scale, so do their systems—ERP, CRM, legacy apps, modern SaaS platforms, and mobile front ends. Initially, developers often build point-to-point integrations between Power Platform and external systems using:
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Power Automate flows with direct SQL/API calls
Scheduled synchronisations
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Custom connectors per app
Result?
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Tightly coupled systems
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High latency in large data sets
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Error-prone retry mechanisms
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Lack of centralized monitoring, auditability, or retry orchestration
This architecture fails to scale — especially in large enterprises with asynchronous workflows, variable payloads, and spike-driven workloads.
🎯 Solution Goals
✅ Build resilient, loosely coupled, and scalable integration between Power Platform and enterprise systems.
✅ Use Azure Service Bus to decouple producers (Power Platform apps) from consumers (external apps, APIs, legacy systems).
✅ Ensure real-time or near real-time processing with robust retry, dead-lettering, and auditing.
✅ Design for future extensibility — multiple consumers and parallel processing.
✅ Govern the solution using standard patterns, monitoring, and policy enforcement.
🧩 Solution Overview
We will use a Publisher–Subscriber pattern with Azure Service Bus Topics to implement scalable integration. Power Platform (via Power Automate or plugins) publishes messages to Service Bus, while external systems subscribe and process messages independently.
🏢 Real-World Use Case
Organization: A global e-commerce company
Scenario:
When a customer order is created in the Power App (Dataverse), downstream systems must:
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Trigger fulfillment in SAP
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Send SMS via Twilio
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Notify warehouse inventory system (custom API)
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Log data to Azure Data Lake
These systems are owned by different departments, updated asynchronously, and may fail intermittently.
🔧 Key Components
Component Description Dataverse Captures order data via Power App Power Automate (or Plugin) Sends message to Azure Service Bus Topic Azure Service Bus (Topic + Subscriptions) Acts as message broker and dispatcher Subscriber Logic Apps / Azure Functions Consume messages and update external systems Application Insights Monitoring, logging, alerts Azure Key Vault Securely store credentials for API connections Power BI Dashboard Monitor success/failure rates, latency, retry counts
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Dataverse | Captures order data via Power App |
| Power Automate (or Plugin) | Sends message to Azure Service Bus Topic |
| Azure Service Bus (Topic + Subscriptions) | Acts as message broker and dispatcher |
| Subscriber Logic Apps / Azure Functions | Consume messages and update external systems |
| Application Insights | Monitoring, logging, alerts |
| Azure Key Vault | Securely store credentials for API connections |
| Power BI Dashboard | Monitor success/failure rates, latency, retry counts |
