Summary (for our beginners here)
As a part of the Power Platform Power Automate allows us among several kinds applications to create the Cloud Flows. These are serverless processes created with a graphical user interface and only for certain cases you will need some code (the expressions).
The Flows can be compared to the Logic Apps (it is identical in many aspects), which are created with Azure. An alternative are the Azure Functions, but this time you are allowed to program with actual code.
Basically you have the main parts you would have for programming, like conditions, variables etc.. Other components are the "Connectors", which represent Web Services (Web APIs) and allow easy integration of these. The complex functionalities are most likely to be provided by the services.
If you are developing Business Applications with Power Platform (which includes Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement), you mostly likely will be confronted with the Flows. This is also because Microsoft encourages to use these instead of the "classic" Workflows.
The important part now
What is your experience about the Cloud Flows? In my opinion these can be great, if the company uses these to allow users, the Citizen Developers, to create their own "little applications". Given that the allowed Connectors are limited and other restrictions. But if you plan to use them as part of a whole system, in sense of the traditional development, you can face some issues. Just imagine using it for data integration, there are chances that you hit limitations (if Flows exceed a certain amount of actions or runs, throttling will happen or even suspending). Another thing, which is annoying, is that Flows get deactivated after some time without being triggered. Just imagine a very important Flow, which usually would run to send a warning message, but suddenly gets turned off. Only the Owner would receive a notification with E-Mail.
There seems to be only one option, if you look at the plans and are currently using the "Per User Plan": The "Per Flow Plan", which is not only limited to single Flows, but seems also to be quite expensive. There are plenty other issues, but for now I would like to read your experiences!
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