Webinar Series: Cloud services to advance your research

by Contributed | Jan 14, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

The latest on Azure Active Directory Spring Integrations

by Contributed | Jan 14, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Whether you are building a web API, mobile front end or a good-old fashioned desktop application, identity and access management will always be foundational pieces that are front and center in writing software. Azure offers a great platform to democratize your application development journey, as it not only offers a cloud-base identity service, but also deep integration with the rest of the Azure ecosystem. Spring Security has made it easy to secure your Spring based applications with powerful abstractions and extensible interfaces. However as powerful as the Spring framework can be, it is not tailored to a specific identity provider. The Azure Spring Boot Starter for Azure Active Directory is the result of collaborative efforts from Microsoft and VMware to provide the most optimal way to connect your application to an Azure AD tenant and protect resource APIs with Azure Active Directory. Case in point, there are scenarios where you may want to authorize against multiple resource servers, and you can simply do that by including multiple authorization clients in your application configuration.

To get started with the Azure Spring boot starter for Azure Active Directory, connect your application to an Azure AD tenant, and include the following configuration in your application.yml:

azure:
  activedirectory:
    tenant-id: xxxxxx-your-tenant-id-xxxxxx
    client-id: xxxxxx-your-client-id-xxxxxx
    client-secret: xxxxxx-your-client-secret-xxxxxx
    authorization-clients:
      graph:
        scopes:
            - https://graph.microsoft.com/User.Read
            - https://graph.microsoft.com/Directory.AccessAsUser.All

Get the OAuth2AuthorizedClient in your Controller:

@GetMapping("/graph")
@ResponseBody
public String graph(
    @RegisteredOAuth2AuthorizedClient("graph") OAuth2AuthorizedClient client
) {
// Now you can use the access token to access a graph URI
}

For more detail see our sample project.

azure:
  activedirectory:
    authorization-clients:
      graph:
        scopes:
            - https://graph.microsoft.com/User.Read
            - https://graph.microsoft.com/Directory.AccessAsUser.All

azure:
  activedirectory:
    authorization-clients:
      arm:
        on-demand: true
        scopes: https://management.core.windows.net/user_impersonation

Ten things you can implement to save costs in your Azure environment

by Contributed | Jan 14, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Managing costs is a skillset that we need to learn when managing resources in the cloud, it is a change from running your resources on-premises. Managing costs can feel a bit overwhelming but it should be a team job, folks from your IT department, Finance Department and even your senior leadership all have a role to play in the whole process.

There are actions you can take when designing workloads or actions after your workloads are implemented to help save on costs.  In this video I look at ten things that you can do or implement that will help with your overall costs.

1. Take advantage of Azure Advisor’s recommendations regarding performance, security and cost.


2. Right size your workloads for their needs, no need to have resources allocated that you don’t need.


3. Look at utilising different regions to make use of cheaper services, if that makes sense for your workloads.


4. If you know you’ll be running a certain workload for certain amount of time look at utilising Azure Reservations.


5. Leverage existing software license or subscription investments and see if you can enable Azure Hybrid Use.


6. Spot Virtual Machines take advantage of unused capacity within the Azure datacentres, see if you can incorporate them into your workload design.


7. If you’re not using a virtual machine for days, or even weeks at a time shutdown it down, don’t pay for something you aren’t using.


8. Free Services, there are a bunch of services within Azure that are either entirely free or have free tiers, find out about them, and see where they can find in with your design and workload management strategy.


9. Take advantage of Azure Dev/Test Labs’s templated environment setup to allow people to spin up environments when they need to try or test something, it can help in the overall management of your IT department if some process are “self-service”.


10. Microsoft Learn is a great place to learn Azure, with constant new and updated content and free sandbox environments available for you to get hands on with the service.

Join us over on our community Discord server to chat more about cost management and saving tips!