Deploying workflows to existing Logic App incrementally

Question

Hi, I'm a relapsed developer and have some questions after spending a day trying to wrap my head around arm templates.

I've written some workflows within some existing Logic apps in a dev subscription which interact with Azure blob storage, ADF and another web based system. They have passed unit testing and now I want to deploy them to the test subscription (the next environment).

I understand that the best way to do this is using ARM templates or Bicep (which will then compile to an ARM template) but I have never done this before and am trying to get my head around parameterising the ARM template produced by Azure portal with VSCode.

A further restriction at my workplace is that the DevOps team insist that they deploy and maintain all the infrastructure (logic apps, storage accounts, etc.) and the developers only write the workflows. ADF pipelines, etc.

So I have to learn how to deploy workflows to within an existing logic app in the the test environment (and subsequent environments). The storage accounts, logic apps, etc. all have "dev" or "test" or "prod" in them as well.

The next step once I manage this is to work out some way of automating the deployments from dev to test (and later ultimately to production) using Azure pipelines (hence me trying to get it working using ARM templates at the moment).

However, I have only really found one article which mentions what I'm trying to do as some high level steps:
https://vinniejames.medium.com/devops-for-azure-logic-apps-standard-9cad5f94b731

This makes me wonder if the way that I'm going about this isn't overly complex, most of the other articles out there involve deploying the entire Logic app and other objects as well as the workflows.

Is doing things in this way (developers only deploy workflows) going to hinder our ability to automate deployments?

Should I be starting off by doing some basic arm template deployments and working my up from there?

Are there any tools I should be using to make my life easier when doing this?

Answer 1

@Spike Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A, apologize for any inconvenience caused on this.

Based on the shared description, we have understood that you are trying to create a new workflow in one of existing standard logic app through ARM template.

Standard logic app underlyingly uses app service plan, when you deploy your workflow from local machine (using visual studio code or through zip deploy) as a part of deployment process it will delete existing workflow content and will deploy the new workflow related code only which results in losing the existing workflows.

To achieve your requirement, you need to create a custom solution using visual studio and version control system like GitHub repo /azure DevOps repro to maintain your standard logic app workflow code.

Every time when you are creating the workflow you will be cloning the existing content from the git repo to local and then committing those changes and publish it to logic app (using standard logic app extension) which will redeploy all the workflow of your logic app.

You can refer to these documentations on setting up DevOps deployment for standard logic apps and creating workflows in standard logic app through visual studio.

Feel free to reach back to me if you have any further questions on this.