Power Platform Licensing Challenge - When to use which?
I recently wrote a post explaining the difference between the Power Apps and Power Automate Licensing SKUs, and Copilot Studio Licensing, so to continue with the licensing theme I thought I’d give you a licensing challenge too! 😁
One of the challenges with Power Platform licensing is how to bring the different licenses together to achieve your use case in the most efficient way. Depending on the requirements of your use case, and how you therefore architect your solution, you could have different licensing options! What do I mean? Well let me show you…. with some pictures! 😁
Licensing challenge description
Let’s imagine a use case - This one is based on a conversation I had with one of the customers I’m working with at the moment. They have a Power BI report which is produced on some data in an Oracle Database. They want to be able to embed a Power App to provide commentary about the data in the report. That data needs to go back into the Oracle DB and they would like to also send a message when this happens to provide feedback to the submitter that it’s been submitted.
There are different ways we could do this and it may depend on the actual requirements, or we might have some flexibility in how we deliver it.
(Note - For these examples I’ve excluded the Power BI licensing element but that is also a consideration too and would include scenarios like individual Power BI Pro licensing either through E5 license or specific license, or use of Power BI Premium Capacity on a Workspace)
Option 1 - Put the data directly into the Oracle DB
Option 1 - Put the data directly into the Oracle DB
In this option we might use the Oracle connector in our Power App to put the commentary directly into a table in there. This is a premium connector so all of our makers and users will need a flavour of Power Apps Premium license as explained in my previous post… Premium / Per User, Pay as you Go, or Per App - for the purpose of this calculation I’ve chosen Per App at list price of $5 per app, per person, per month.
As part of this solution we can also make a Permium Flow using this data and send an email, or a Teams message, for comms. As this is ‘in the context of the app’ it’s covered by our Premium Power App license.
If we think about number of licenses we need -
We’ve got 5 developers who could be developing our solution in the Dev environment
Those 5 developers might then be moving it into the Test Environment and we may have 10 testers
The developers might also move it into the production environment and we’ve got 400 users
(Caveat… This is just for simplicity of the calculation… it could be that those devs are also working on a load of other things too and so a Premium / Per User license might make more sense…. Also we may have a pipeline set up to move the solutions so we can prevent human developer accounts having access to Test and Prod)
So based on those criteria of license choice and number of people who need licenses we can multiply that out and it comes to $25,500 per year - That might be the right answer and have sufficient Return on Investment… It might not. Only the use case owner can tell us!
So… How else might we do this?
Option 2 - Pool the data and (potentially) at a longer frequency then move the commentary into the Oracle DB in batches at certain times…
In this example those comments from within the Power App embedded in the Power BI report puts them into a SharePoint list... And then a Power Automate Process licensed Flow acts as a service and takes that data and puts it in the database and sends a confirmation message.
Let's look at the licenses needed in this scenario:
For the Power App piece we're just using the SharePoint connector - It's a standard connector so is covered by our M365 license so no additional cost for that piece across our Dev, Test, and Prod environments.
To create the Flow to the Oracle DB our Developers are going to need a premium license. I've used a Power Automate Premium license at $15 per person per month, We then need to license that Flow with a Process license at $150 per flow per month in the Dev, Test, and Prod environments.
As before we can multiply that out and it comes to $8,100 per year - a very different cost to our previous example and so perhaps easier to achieve an acceptable Return on Investment.
There, of course are also other options to how you could architect your solution depending on your requirements…
Some examples that I was thinking of were use of an Azure Logic App instead of Power Automate? Perhaps you might use a Service Bus to take that commentary and integrate it with the system hosting the data? These aren’t things that I have much experience with and I’m not sure on the funding models for these. If you do then I’d love to get your thoughts on how these costs might compare. It would also be fantastic to hear your thoughts on what other architecture options there could be and potential costs?
Multiplexing
So… back to the topic… With choices on how we architect and license our solutions there’s an important topic we need to also talk about… Multiplexing! Microsoft have a pretty good briefing document describing multiplexing. They describe it as ““Multiplexing” is when individuals use hardware or software to pool connections, reroute or indirectly access information, and/or reduce the number of devices or users that directly access or use a product.”
I wrote the bulk of this post over a week ago… Since then I’ve been trying to get feedback on whether this scenario is Multiplexing of not…. Originally I thought not… Then I thought yes… Then maybe… I’ve had multiple opinions that say Yes… No…. Maybe…. and GO AWAY AND STOP TALKING TO ME ABOUT YOUR STUPID POWER PLATFORM LICENSING…. It turns our my Partner really isn’t that interested in Power Platform… 😂 Anyway… I’m pulling the pin… throwing it out there and will sit back and watch the chat on my LinkedIn post to get your thoughts!
Power Apps & Power Automate Licensing Overview 🔴 LIVE (July 31, 2021)
In this video from Reza Dorrani (MVP) and Priya Kodukala (Microsoft) they discuss this same scenario between 51:56 and 54:45 and Priya suggests that if it’s an automated (e.g. On Create, or On Change) or scheduled flow (e.g. run every Tuesday at 3pm) that the Flow runs as the Flow Owner and so they need to be licensed…. but if the Flow is invoked by a person then every person needs to be licensed.
So I’m going to put it out for discussion, see what responses there are, and then seek feedback from the brains in Power Platform Product Group to get a definitive answer! 😁
