A program I have written has many modules we can turn on or off depending on the clients preference or if the client pays for the feature. Some features may be charged on a subscription basses and needs to expire after a given date
I am looking for a cloud based solution I could have like a dashboard and be able to see all the clients and what features are set and be able to control (Turn on Turn Off and set expiration dates) these features of my program in a central place.
Is there any such service out there or something I could easily tweak to do this?
What would be building blocks if I need to design on by myself for cheap?
It would be used by around 100-300 clients
I suggest you look for delphi BAAS cloud
Unfortunately I didn't try to show you some example, but have some videos on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqeFAuURBro
Related
I have built a spring boot/angular web application that uses a mySQL database for storage. The web application's main purpose is to be like a social media website for gardeners. Next to this it has a couple of tools that allow the user to generate a personalized planting calendar based on the monthly average temperature curve of the region where the user lives. Alternatively the user can also generate a personalized planting calendar based on planting journals made by other users that live within a certain radius near the user doing the calendar generating. I am using Hibernate Search for this.
I do not expect to get millions of visits in the first months after launching the web application, so my question is: What would be the best ec2 instance type to start out with? Could a t3.micro support an application like that for the first months or two? Also, How will i know when the current instance type can no longer handle the incoming traffic without lag and therefore i need to upgrade to a bigger instance like t3.medium or large?
Thank you
If the instance is suitable or not depends on many things. Based on my experience a micro instance is not enough for many use cases.
My suggestion is to start with a t3.small instance, start gathering metrics in CloudWatch to establish your baseline for few days. Then decide if it is enough or not.
If you are filling all your resources you can eventually upgrade to a bigger instance. However if your app is dealing with Java I think that a medium size is the minimum start.
About the lag and other things, first suggestion is to put CloudFront on top of the EC2 at least for all your static content (suggestion: put your static contents on S3 don't let EC2 serve them). Then I think that the only option is to rely on some third party performance tool, external to AWS.
By the way, I have built the same app on iOS many years ago, with a support website hosted on AWS. Now the app is gone, and the website is unmaintained :-)
I am currently investigating possible tools with which to develop a workflow solution for a company that would be used by the staff to process incoming work and ensure incoming work is routed to the correct people for evaluation and are authorised by the relevant managers before work commences, and that the work is signed off when complete.
Is Microsoft Power Automate the right tool for this kind of work, or is it [simply] a tool for automating ones own personal tasks? I'm looking for something that could be used to develop a tool that would be used by everyone in the company.
I've looked at the various videos but it looks like it might be just something for automating ones personal tasks rather than building something to be shared. Is this correct or can it be used as a software development tool for developing a custom solution for a company?
Look at Business Process Flows (BPFs).
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/business-process-flows-overview
The following text is from "Why use business process flows?" on the above link:
Business process flows provide a guide for people to get work done.
They provide a streamlined user experience that leads people through
the processes their organization has defined for interactions that
need to be advanced to a conclusion of some kind. This user experience
can be tailored so that people with different security roles can have
an experience that best suits the work they do.
Use business process flows to define a set of steps for people to
follow to take them to a desired outcome. These steps provide a visual
indicator that tells people where they are in the business process.
Business process flows reduce the need for training because new users
don’t have to focus on which table they should be using. They can let
the process guide them. You can configure business process flows to
support common sales methodologies that can help your sales groups
achieve better results. For service groups, business process flows can
help new staff get up-to-speed more quickly and avoid mistakes that
could result in unsatisfied customers.
You can create broad, or detailed, BPFs, to cover company wide business processes. You can also call on separate normal flows, validations, and more. There are a lot of ways you can use a BPF to move things forward in a company.
Power Automate (aka MS Flow) is a low code/no code business workflow management or process orchestration software, getting more power with Robotic Process Automation & Virtual Agents inclusion.
The concept is having variety of connectors for all the available SaaS solutions (name anything like Dynamics, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Twitter, Facebook, Exchange mailbox, OneDrive, SharePoint, etc) to act as both Trigger and Action to achieve what we want. At worst case we can use REST APIs to complete the project setup.
Community demo the usefulness of it by showcasing the automation of personal stuffs but it has more. MS Flow is the alternate for Dynamics CRM 365 workflow and SharePoint workflow as well. Definitely it’s an enterprise candidate to solve company wide problems like onboarding, approvals, and many other workflow solutions.
Personally I would look at Azure Logic Apps for that level. It has just about the same connectors as MS Flow , but with the addition of better management, troubleshooting and extensibility capabilities and you get all the benefits of security in Azure and compliance good stuff that companies would need
I'll try to explain my goal as good as I can;
I want to trigger a script whenever there is a new computer added to a Organizational Unit.
To do this i need to activate the logging of this event under the local security policy/audit policy. I guess my question is, do I need to do this on all the domain controllers, or is it enough to do it one just one?
Also, is it possible to see the event from a member server with the Management Tools pack installed? As I don't want to put too much work on the Domain Controllers.
Here is the Microsoft article that gives 4 ways of tracking changes in Microsoft Active-Directory. You will find everything you need from configuring the eventlog to receiving notifications by way of different kind of polling.
I have a desktop application which uses flat files (some xml and small pictures) as data. I want this data to be available on other PCs which have the desktop application installed and usable by a smartphone client (WP7 at the moment) as well.
The user should have it very easy to synchronize this data. He should be able to use accounts he already possesses (Live-Login, Googlemail, Facebook,...).
I thought about using Azure Blob Storage to save the data in Azure, the Sync Framework to perform the actual synchronization and the Access Control Service to handle authentication.
I have not used any of this technologies before so any advice would be great but I'm searching foremost for errors or shortcomings in this strategy I don't see yet. Is this approach viable at all?
Windows Azure is basically a virtualized datacentre. It is elaborate and complicated and is pitched at corporations who don't want to own their server infrastructure or hardware.
If I understand correctly, what you want is a cloud fileserver, not a whole LAN. Windows SkyDrive fulfils this requirement nicely and offers 25GB of storage per member with no charge for membership.
About Hotmail and Windows Live People often confuse Hotmail and
Windows Live, because when you set up a Hotmail account it uses
Windows Live for authentication and therefore you end up with a
Windows Live account and all the associated facilities, including
SkyDrive. However, it is entirely possible to set up a Windows Live
account using any email address as the username.
If you do this, it is important to be aware that the Windows Live
password associated with a given email address is completely
independent of the password required by the mail server that hosts
mail for the account. This can cause a great deal of user confusion.
For Hotmail (or any other mail server that uses Windows Live for
authentication) they are guaranteed to be the same password.
There is no official Microsoft framework support for SkyDrive. There is an open source project called SkyDriveApiClient, but it only works with the full .NET framework. I tried porting it but the author was a bit of an architecture astronaut, and it is absolutely riddled with [Serializable] which is not available on WP7x.
The WP7 guys have said that the WP7 framework will probably include support for SkyDrive but not in Mango (WP7.1) and given that Microsoft's typical release cycle is 18 months and Mango has yet to hit the streets, I'd say it will be two years before you can count on intrinsic cloud file services for WP7.
Roll-your-own wouldn't be hard, WCF services are dead easy to use from WP7. But that's not really cloud since you have to provide and maintain the server infrastructure yourself. For this reason and given the MS timetable, I have put a great deal of effort into producing my own SkyDrive client for WP7. Core functionality is complete and I am now refactoring, improving robustness and adding performance enhancements like local cacheing of tokens (cookies, essentially). I don't intend to release it; I have a number of apps planned that depend on this functionality and it suits me fine that there is a substantial barrier to competition.
I didn't tell you that to tease you. My point is that I'm so sure SkyDrive is the right answer that I put a lot of work into making it happen.
Cloud file storage is a perfect fit for mobile devices.
Azure is not a good answer for the sort of phone apps individuals want because the data store isn't shared in a way that required indexing or supports high levels of concurrency
I can certainly think of corporate phone apps that would benefit from using SQL Server as storage
Azure can do file services but it represents an ongoing expense. Nobody's going to put up with that when Google and Microsoft both give away web based cloud storage.
I can personally attest that if you're determined, it is possible to use SkyDrive from WP7.
Cloud storage is the only way you're going to get programmatically accessible storage that's shared by your user's mobile device and his computer. One of the things I intend to do that depends on shared storage is write a Silverlight app that lets you prepare map routes with multiple waypoints on a desktop computer and a companion app that uses them on WP7.
The Windows Live team has released what they call support for WP7. They supply a sample project showing you how to instantiate a browser object and load their login pages and manipulate them to log in and use their javascript API to manipulate SkyDrive.
This has one big advantage: browser cookies and cached credentials. The disadvantages are obvious; technical shortcomings notwithstanding the Windows Live team seems to think the only thing people want to do with a phone is tag their photos and fiddle with social media.
I have finished my own libraries. They do not support most of the social media twaddle. I have treated SkyDrive as no more or less than a cloud file system, providing
Authenticate(username, password)
CreateFolder(folderpath[, blocking=false])
Delete(fileOrFolderPath[, blocking=false])
SaveString(filepath, value[, blocking=false])
LoadString(filepath)
I could handle binaries but Convert.ToBase64 makes this unnecessary and strings are convenient for XML. CreateFolder, Delete and SaveString are optionally blocking. LoadString is always blocking because it's a function that returns the loaded string. CreateFolder is recursive so you can create an entire path in one call (eg /folder1/folder2/folder3). Calling CreateFolder on a pre-existing path has no effect, and SaveString uses CreateFolder to ensure the path is valid, making it unnecessary to create a filepath in advance. Authenticate loads the file system (except file content) into memory eliminating server chatter. This is asynchronous and a FileSystemReady event announces when the file system is completely loaded. The model is maintained as you add and remove files and folders.
This was a lot of work and no one reponded to my attempt to make it an open source project so I'm not inclined to give the fruits of my labour away, but provided your plans don't compete with mine I could be persuaded to come to an arrangement.
We are looking at a standard way of configuring the various "endpoints" of our application. Our application is a distributed system with Windows Desktop applications, Windows Server "services" and databases.
We currently configure each piece using XML files. This is getting a little out of hands as we work with larger customers who can have dozens of Servers running our application and hundreds of desktop clients.
Can anyone recommend a Microsoft technology or a third party that would allow us to centralize all that configuration information and manage it in a one place for all our applications? Any changes would be "pushed" to the endpoint(s) that are interested.
For example, if we were to change the login for one of our database, we would make that change on the database, then reflect that change in our centralized system. Following that last step, any service that needs to connect to the database would be notified of the change (and potentially receive the new data). How and what each endpoint does with that information is outside the scope of the system.
Our primary business is not "Centralized Configuration Services". We are a GIS company that provides solutions for various utilities worldwide.
I've done a couple of things to give myself this functionality over the years. I build enterprise applicatons that may be distributed across many servers. I don't want to bury config settings in each services config file or each web server's web.config file. For application specific stuff I usually create an application settings table in the app's database. The table only has two fields. SettingName and SettingValue. I then write a web or wcf service whose sole function it is to retrieve these settings. I write a function called GetSetting where you pass "SettingName" and it returns SettingValue or an empty string if your setting is not found. This way I can store all application settings for all components of the application in one spot. Maintenance and troubleshooting for this is really easy, I'm not hunting through scads of config files spread across a dozen web and app servers.
For larger scale apps I might create a separate AppSettings database where I add a new field to my table mentioned above. ApplicationName. My web or wcf service for this approach has the same method call (GetSetting) only at this scope I pass ApplicationName and SettingName and it returns SettingValue or an empty string.
Doing either of these things allows you to centralize all app settings for any size application or IT shop. It has worked really well for us.
You could use RSS together with BitTorrent to distribute changes. See Wikipedia. It is not MS specific however, but should provide the flexibility you need - a configuration server holding the configuration and providing the feeds needed to configure the clients and possibly servers.
Any VCS through a secure channel?
For example, git through ssh (both available in cygwin).
I think the first step is to have the secure channel (if you want the push ability, pulling might be different).
As for managing the "versions" in different "branches", what's better than a version control system?
As it goes for the Microsoft requirement, well the Microsoft sofwares in that exists in that area would suck pretty bad in your case (as in not the best tool for the job).