Tuesday 30 June 2020

Multi-Geo for MS Teams

O365 offers multi-geo tenants to meet data residency rules for 13 countries and regions (as of 30 June 2020):
  1. Australia
  2. Asia Pacific 
  3. Canada
  4. European Union
  5. France
  6. India
  7. Japan
  8. Korea
  9. United Kingdom
  10. United States
  11. United Arab Emirates
  12. South Africa
  13. Switzerland.
Teams data resides in SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Exchange Online.  With Multi-Geo enabled, a company can specify where data will reside.  There are 2 parts to multi-geo:
  • User specific data.  This data is stored in various satellite Geo for each user e.g. email, OneDrive
  • Company/Project/division specific data e.g. file shares, Document libraries
For more info on Multi-Geo on O365

Microsoft "Multi-Geo is currently available to Enterprise Agreement customers with a minimum of 250 Microsoft 365 Services subscriptions."

The UK South Azure Region has 3 data centres/zones, and it's geo-paired paired with UK West there is over 150 mile between the regions. 

MS Teams Background Info:
https://www.pbeck.co.uk/2019/12/microsoft-teams-governance.html
https://www.pbeck.co.uk/2020/05/microsoft-teams-overview.html

Note: Microsoft since 2022 I think have Microsoft Priva to help manage country privacy & compliance laws 

Wednesday 24 June 2020

Postman API Builder Intro

Overview: Tools for building and mocking API's.  Swagger has good tooling and my original preferred choice.  APIM - Great tooling, part of Azure and easy to replace mocks as you go along with the live implementation.  Postman is offering a great set of functionality to rival Swagger and APIM.  This post looks at Postman's new functionality around building API's.

Postman API Builder:
Not only a test rig, it now offers the ability to build API's and mock:
  • Mock - so you can test supports key and OAuth authentication
  • Assert Tests - You can specify asserts in postman
  • Test suite - generate collections/Collection Runner - Allows a set of related tests to run sequentially.
]
  • Document the API
  • Monitor
  • Version control for changes e.g. GITHub
  • API Versions supported
  • Note: Free plan has all of this, limited on the number of API's but all the features are on the free plan.  The main notation formats are support including:  Open API specification (OAS) & GraphQL
Summary:
I like Swagger tooling, I have done a few projects find APIM fantastic for building API's quickly.  Postman historically was merely my test rig but looking at the functionality, Postman API Builder is a great option for designing and building API's.  Postman is a good tool for building into CI/CD pipelines to validate API's.

Few more assert examples:

Postman offers a service to monitor API's using your postman collections, these can be triggered using Curl so can build into DevOps, Power Automated scheduled flows,....
sentry.io looks good as an alternative option