Workflow Design
Integration platforms and workflow engines
Understand the roles of integration platforms and workflow engines, then assess the capabilities and operating model your processes need.
An integration platform helps applications exchange data and perform actions across systems. A workflow engine controls the steps of a process, including decisions, waits and failures. Their capabilities can overlap, so choose against the work your organisation needs to run.
For one exchange between two applications, a direct integration may be enough. When several flows need shared connections and oversight, an integration platform may help. When a process must keep track of progress across waits or interruptions, examine the workflow engine's state and recovery behaviour.
Identify the job
Describe the business outcome and the systems involved. A retailer might need a paid order sent to fulfilment, a stock change sent to its storefront and an exception sent to an operations team. These related flows may need different designs.
| Primary need | Capability to inspect |
|---|---|
| Exchange data between applications | Required operations, authentication, transformation and connection management |
| Coordinate several steps | Decisions, waits, task results and execution history |
| Reuse integrations across teams | Shared connections, deployment controls and ownership |
| Recover uncertain work | A way to inspect progress and reconcile actions in the destination |
An integration platform may include workflow execution features, and a workflow engine may call external APIs. Check the exact service and deployment option.
Demand for new integrations tends to exceed an organisation's capacity to build them. Gartner has attributed 70 per cent of digital transformation project failures to a lack of integration quality.
Microsoft's integration guidance holds that every integration process needs orchestration: a way to define and run the workflow's logic. Sometimes direct API calls are suitable; sometimes systems must communicate asynchronously through messaging or events.
Integration Platform Usage and Impact
- Digital Transformation Failure Rate
- 70%
- Power Automate Connector Count
- 1,000+
- AWS EventBridge Sources
- 140+
Understand what each tool supplies
An integration platform as a service, or iPaaS, commonly supplies connectors and tools for building flows between applications. Some also provide mapping, transformation and monitoring. A catalogue entry does not establish that a connector exposes your required trigger, action or field.
Trace the whole route: where the event starts, whether a lookup is needed, how the data changes shape and which destination response confirms the action. The connected applications still determine their own permissions and API behaviour.
A workflow engine focuses on execution. Depending on the product, its model may express decisions, parallel work, waits and tasks, with a record of each execution. That helps when an approval or callback determines the next step. It does not make every external write safe to repeat: a destination may complete a request even if its response is lost.
IBM describes an integration platform as a cohesive set of middleware products used to develop, secure and govern flows across applications, systems, services and data stores, and to create and manage APIs for hybrid integration requirements.
How a platform is assembled
A platform is often several service categories rather than one product. Microsoft's Azure guidance splits the work across API Management for publishing APIs, Service Bus for messaging, Event Grid for events, Logic Apps for workflows, Functions for event-driven orchestration and Data Factory for data transformation.
Connectors supply prebuilt operations used as steps in a workflow. Each operation is either a trigger that starts a workflow or an action that performs a task, with properties you configure; some connectors offer only triggers, others only actions. Where no connector exists, a generic HTTP operation or a custom connector is the fallback.
Connector variants differ in hosting and billing. Built-in connectors in Logic Apps run natively inside the service, while managed connectors are hosted by Microsoft as a wrapper around an underlying API and are billed at Standard or Enterprise level. The variant available depends on the hosting model, and many connectors still need a configured connection to authenticate a user account.
Choose an operating boundary
Decide who can build and deploy flows, who owns each connection and who responds when a run stops. Review how the chosen option separates development from production, controls access and shows failed executions. Include the work needed when an application changes its API or authentication rules.
Workflow types within one engine can differ in their maximum duration and execution model.
Estimate demand from source events, outbound actions, retries and time spent waiting. Then check the current charging units and limits for the intended licence and deployment. A generic price or capacity claim cannot settle the cost of your flow.
Power Automate combines cloud flows, desktop flows that automate user interfaces, task and process mining, and attended or unattended robot execution. It advertises built-in security, governance and monitoring for scaling automation across an organisation.
Its catalogue lists more than 1,000 API connectors.
Match execution guarantees to the work
In AWS Step Functions you choose a Standard or Express workflow type when you create a state machine, and the type cannot be changed afterwards.
Standard workflows run for up to one year and keep an auditable execution history retrievable through the API for 90 days after completion. They follow an exactly-once model unless retry behaviour is specified, suiting non-idempotent actions such as processing payments, and are billed by state transitions.
Express workflows run for up to five minutes and use an at-least-once model, so an execution may run more than once. That suits idempotent actions such as writing data to a table with a PUT action, and billing counts executions, total duration and memory consumed.
Both types can start from events, including HTTP requests from Amazon API Gateway, IoT rules and more than 140 other sources in Amazon EventBridge.
Record a representative decision
Suppose an order needs stock reserved, then a manager's decision before a supplier request is sent. The integration must reach the order, stock and supplier systems. The process must retain which order is waiting, which decision is expected and whether the supplier request was confirmed. One product might cover both jobs; another design might use an integration platform alongside a separate workflow engine.
Record the required operations, owner, deployment option, connection identity, expected volume, wait duration and recovery path. For each external write, establish how an operator would determine whether it succeeded if the response were lost. Without that answer, unattended retries may repeat the action.
In this guide
- Comparing an iPaaS with point-to-point integrationsCompare direct integrations with an iPaaS using connection growth, ownership, change control and ongoing operating work.
- Checking connector limitations before selecting a platformCheck connector operations, fields, licensing, limits and network paths before committing a workflow to a platform.
