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Showing posts from February, 2019

How to run Azure Functions on AWS and on-premises

Nowadays cloud and hybrid cloud solutions are highly demanded by companies. In this post, we will talk about a technical solution for business logic that it’s supported by multiple clouds provides and can run on-premises without any kind of issues. The requirements for the given scenario is the following: We need to be able to expose an API that can execute tasks that runs for 2-5 minutes each in parallel. The native platform shall be Microsoft Azure, but it should be able to run on dedicated hardware in specific countries like China and Russia. With minimal effort, it should be able to run on the AWS platform. The current team that we had available was a .NET Core team, with good skills on ASP.NET. There are numerous services available on Azure that can run in different environments also. The most attractive ones are the ones on top of Kubernetes and microservices. Even so, we decided to do things a little different. We had to take into considerations that an autoscaling function

How to access Power BI resources from client application (first and third party embedding)

In this post, we will talk about different ways on how we can authenticate and authorize our applications to access our Power BI Reports. Things become a little bit confusing because there are reports that can be owned by the users that access them or by another user. Additional to this there are cases when the users own the report, but not the data that are displayed. Before jumping to the solution, we need to understand a few concepts related to how Power BI works when you use embedded functionality. The basic idea of Power BI embedded functionality is the ability to integrate an IFRAME inside your application. Inside the IFRAME we can display any content we want from reports to dashboards. The IFRAME content is loaded directly from Power BI services using an URL and a security token. The security token can be obtained from Azure AD thought your application. This involves two steps for authentication. The first step is happening when you call directly or indirectly the Azure AD

Events and Message based system comparison

I heard very often discussion related to messaging and event systems. People are trying to compare them and decide on one solution that suits all their needs on a platform. Comparison of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and an Event base messaging system it’s wrong from the beginning. Even if both solutions are great, they resolve different problems that we might have on a platform. ESB and Events are able to transport data between two or multiple systems, but this is where the similarities end. From the way how they are design, core features and what we can achieve with each of them, we will notify that their capabilities are limited and they don’t compete between each other. As we will discover, later on, a complex solution might need to use both approaches to offer a consistent and competitive solution. To be able to give hands-on examples, we will use for comparison two services that Microsoft Azure is offering. Azure Service Bus – an ESB solution hosted inside Microsoft Azu