Identity based security for LogicApp to LogicApp communication

Introduction

For today’s post we’ll go through a simple (yet powerful!) example that shows you how to securely communicate between two LogicApps. For this we will leverage the concept of managed system identity on the sender and access token validation on the receiver.

Conceptual

To get a bit of an idea of the flow, let us take a look at the drawing below…

The sender (LogicApp on the top left) is foreseen of a Managed System Identity in AAD. It will leverage this capability to get an access token from AAD. In addition, we will include a specific audience in the scope. This refers to an application object inside of the AAD tenant.
This token will then be included in the authorization header (as a JWT token) towards the receiver (LogicApp on the top right). The receiver will validate the JWT token by checking the public keys of the issues (AAD). Next up, it will check if the Issuer and Audience provided match the defined policy. If all is okay, then it will accept the request.

Logic Apps ; When do I go for a consumption or a fixed pricing model?

Introduction

Today’s post is about the Logic Apps billing model. As you might know, the Integrated Service Environment has been generally available since May 2019. Since then, there is a consumption plan and a fixed price approach for Logic Apps. Lately I have noticed that this still remains confusing… Let us try to demystify this one then? 😉

 

Bibliography

• Pricing Page ; https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/logic-apps/
• Documentation on Pricing & Billing ; https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-pricing
• Service Limits ; https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-limits-and-config#throughput-limits

How to roll your own rss2twitter bot in 15 minutes in Azure?

Introduction

For today I’ll show you how to roll your own rss2twitter bot in about 15 minutes. What will this bot do?

• Check an RSS feed for new entries
• Parse the new entry and replace key words with hashtags
• Post it to twitter

For this we’ll be using ;

• Azure Function : as the customer code to find/replace certain words
• Logic App : as the tool to create our process via a visual tool

And in the end, we’ll see something like this ;

Azure : Mixing LogicApps & Functions as a periodic data retriever

Introduction

There are various articles/blogs/etc that compare logicapps vs flow vs functions vs azure automation, etc… Though there was one use case where I often struggled what to use ;

What to use when I want to retrieve a file from X on a Y timed interval?

Azure Functions? Great abstraction, though the output files have random names. Sometimes / Often I want to be able to control that.

Flow? Doesn’t allow the customization I was looking for. More to integrate existing / popular services.

Azure Automation? Very good and gets the job done. The only downside, you need to code a lot of logic yourself.

Azure Logic Apps? Shows potential, but doesn’t let you include custom functions. Or does it…?!?

You can link Azure Functions to Logic Apps and create some the flow I was looking for.

 

The Flow

So what do I want to do?

• On a daily basis
• Retrieve content from an authenticated API
• Save the content to a Blob storage

And afterwards I’ll use other services to process that data. 🙂

 

The Proof-of-Concept

What do I want to achieve? On a daily basis I want to retrieve data from a service provider that serves sports data. And if you are looking for such a thing, check out MySportsFeed! So back to our proof-of-concept; how will this look in Logic Apps?

Let’s dissect this flow…