Connector types - Azure Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now that we have a working knowledge of the basic building blocks of logic apps, we have also seen the various tooling, the web base designer, the Visual Studio Code base designer, it is now time to think about deploying and running logic apps. In order to talk about the various deployment options, it will be helpful to revisit the notion of connectors that have been previously covered in this course. So what are connectors? Connectors provide you quick access from your logic app, to events, to data, to actions across other apps and services and systems. So in a sense, by using connectors, you're able to expand the capabilities of logic apps to apps that may be running in other clouds or may be running on premises. Connectors manifest themselves as triggers and action. In fact, it will be helpful for me to just go over to Visual Studio Code just for a quick moment and show you what I mean by connectors are available as triggers and actions. I'm back inside Visual Studio Code. And here we have the logic app that we created previously. Let me go ahead and show you if I right click here, and if I go through this list, it is giving me an option to allow to use the connectors that are available inside Azure. What does that mean? Let me go back to the designer here. So then we created this logic app inside Visual Studio Code, we used the connectors that were built in, which means these connectors were running as part of our logic app itself. But what if you wanted to talk to an email service like Outlook as we have done previously in this course. In order to connect to Outlook, we need to take advantage of a connector that Microsoft has hosted hence the name a managed connector. So by virtue of allowing us to use the connectors hosted in Azure, we get something like this. Let's go ahead and see here. So here you can see two types of connectors, built-in connector and Azure connectors. So let me go here and search for the Outlook connector that we have used previously. It is going out to go to the cloud, find all the matches. Let's go pick Office 365. And this is exactly what I mean here, that a connector is available to you as a set of actions, as you can see here. Using the connector, I can perform an action like delete contact, delete email or delete event or I can trigger my logic app workflow as we did previously. So in our example, previously in this course, we had our logic app triggered by the arrival of an email. So this is a trigger action and this is an action that is all connected to the Outlook connector. Now that we understand the connectors and actions and triggers, let's come back to the slide and let's talk about the different connector types. Built-in connectors, as I said earlier, these are connectors that are directly built into your application, get deployed alongside your logic app. Then you have the notion of a managed connector. And managed connectors are deployed and managed by Microsoft. These connectors, as we said earlier provide triggers and actions for accessing cloud services. And we saw an example of a managed connector. Specifically we saw the Outlook connector. And then finally you have connectors in the logic app preview. Why am I talking about this separately? I'm talking about the separately because as you will see in a moment, logic apps preview allows us the capability to host logic apps in a self-hosted manner, which means your logic apps can be deployed to any environment of your choosing. How do connectors play a role when you're deploying the logic app in a platform or an environment of your choosing? Let's take a quick look.