PowerApps & Functions – Where low/no-code meets serverless… organizations can create apps faster!

Introduction

Like many organization, you’re probably also looking for a more “rapid development” track for a subset of your applications. I’ve heard a lot of reasons for this… Going from rapid prototyping to having small apps that make life a lot easier within the organization (like typical approval flows). For this we’re going to see how we can combine PowerApps & Azure Functions! By using PowerApps we want to take a low/no-code approach to creating the front-end, where Functions (or even Logic Apps as an alternative) will allow us to provide specific back-end data.

Recipe for today

Today we’ll be using the following ingredients as a base for the recipe of the day ;

• Function Backend :  https://github.com/kvaes/azure-functions-turbinerepair (created after following this tutorial)
• PowerApps Tutorial : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-powerapps-scenario

Here we’ll be building a small powerapp that’ll call an API (OpenAPI Spec) that is hosted as an Azure function. So basically connecting a low/no-code app to a serverless API.

Azure Subscription Management – Beyond the 101… aka The Advanced Topics

Introduction

Today’s post will cover three more advanced topics that I’ve seen surfacing on a regular basis ;

• Transferring a Subscription versus Changing the Directory of a Subscription
• Moving resources between subscriptions with different AAD (Azure Active Directory tenants
• Understanding the relationships between components when leveraging an Enterprise Agreement (EA)
• Various advanced scenarios on how AAD in intertwined between subscriptions & the EA

Transfer vs Change Directory

Apparently there is a bit of confusion between the “Transfer” and the “Change Directory” buttons for a subscription ;

In essence ;

Transfer Subscription = Change the Owner AND Change the Directory

What does that mean?

• If you want to transfer the billing of a subscription, you do a “Transfer“.
  (Do note: Transferring a subscription will also change the directory to the one linked to the new owner. If this is a different one, then you’ll be linked to a new AAD Tenant.)
• If you do not want to transfer the billing, and just change the directory, you do a “Change directory“.
  (Do note: Changing a directory will not remove the account owner. And (s)he’ll still have owner rights on it! Also be aware that all rights set linked to the previous tenant will disappear. So you’ll have to reinstate IAM. For which you can easily leverage management groups...)

Replatforming Azure Functions into an Azure Functions Container

Introduction

A while ago I talked about  “Faas/Serverless” in relation to vendor lock-in. Today we’ll be continuing in that road, where we’ll be doing a small proof-of-concept (PoC). In this PoC, we’ll be replatforming existing Azure Functions code into an Azure Functions container!

 

Things to know

Since Azure Functions 2.0 (in preview at the time of writing this post), you are able to leverage containers. Though be aware that there are several known issues. Do check them out first before embarking on your journey!

 

Testdriving 2.0

So first, we’ll start off with testing the Azure Functions Core Tools!  If you’re looking to follow this guide, be sure to have the Azure Functions Core Tools installed, which also depends on .NET Core 2.0 and Nodejs. Once you have those installed, do a “func –help”, and you’ll see what capabilities are at hand…