Microsoft previews new connection management model for Power Automate
As Microsoft Power Automate has grown in use, with more integration points, more complex workflows and logic, and more demanding application lifecycle management (ALM) needs, maintenance of flows has become increasingly complex. For teams pushing Power Automate to its limits, some aspects of solution management have become downright painful.
The Power Automate team believes it has a solution to one of the emerging problems in ALM, the management of connections to other applications across flows. The team announced the public preview of “Connection References” this week, aiming to "make it easier for customers to maintain a level of abstraction between flows and the connections used by them," wrote Sunay Vaishnav, senior program manager for Power Automate.
In the current model, each time such a move is made, all the connections must be manually updated. Microsoft's Sunay explained:
Every action in your flow is bound to a specific instance of a connection that it will use to “execute” that action. This is why today, while moving flows across environments – users are required to rebind every operation to a connection.
Connection references are for solution-aware flows and are particularly useful when moving flows across environments. That task has become a repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone procedure, as EY Kalman explained in reacting to the new preview feature.
For example, I’ve been working with COVID-19 triage solutions. These contain lots of flows within them, connecting to multiple different sources, and doing different things. Every time we’ve performed a release (even if it’s just a simple update), we’ve needed to manually go through each flow, (...
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