Cloud on Inderpal Aulakh

NwHack 2022

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 17:33:17 -0800

Azure Communication Services (ACS) sponsored nwHack 2022 at The University of British Columbia. It was great to see the engagement from students to leverage open source API’s to solve daily problems. …

Android Sample Chat Application using Azure Communication Services and ChatKit

Sun, 08 Aug 2021 15:12:01 -0700

This post demonstrates the Android chat application leveraging Azure Communication Services and ChatKit.

Distributed caching - Redis

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 18:26:03 -0800

Redis is in-memory data structure store. Redis has a really good documentation to learn and implement framework capabilities.

My mentor at Job guided me to learn Redis. My primary focus is to understand how Redis helps for Distributed Caching.

Distributed Caching

Distributed Caching is cache shared by multiple servers. The miclsroservices or services can keep it’s own cache for data but distributed cache has many advantages as we can scale and manage cache at one place.

The caches are used to save time to reduce cost to read database from database. The in memory(RAM cache) data is much more efficient to perform read operations as compared to SQL databases.

Redis supports distributed caching by clusters. Twitter has redis instance for every user across data centers. When a tweet comes, the tweet is inserted into redis cache instance of every user who follows the tweet owner Real Time Delivery Twitter. Distributing caching helps twitter to deliver 300k tweets/sec.

Android Application implementing Azure Active Directory Authentication to call protected Azure Function

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 13:36:35 -0800

In this post, I am writing about how to setup Azure Active Directory Android application login to access Azure functions protected with Azure Active Directory authentication.

Create an Android Application

Open Android Studio and create new Project with Empty Activity.

Configure project with below settings

Get SHA1 & package name

Open powershell and cd to C:\Users<username>.android Execute below command, if prompted for password enter android or leave blank

keytool -list -v -keystore debug.keystore -alias androiddebugkey -storepass android -keypass android

Copy SHA1 -> Navigate to https://base64.guru/converter/encode/hex and convert SHA1 to Base64

Copy package name from AndroidManifest.xml

Now you have packagename & Base64 SHA1 hash

Setup Azure Active Directory

I followed steps from Register your app under Azure Active Directory (using Android platform settings) to setup AAD.

Login to Azure
Open AAD
Click App Registration -> New Registration

Select Authentication
Select Add a platform

Enter SHA1 Hash & package name

Copy Android Configuration

Accessing Azure Pipeline variables in Webpack Node.js

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 21:22:38 -0800

Recently, I struggled a bit to figure out a way to access Azure-Pipeline Variables in Node.js JavaScript/TypeScript project. However, it is easy.

.yml Pipeline code

- task: Npm@1
displayName: "Run project"
env:
MyVariableName: $(MYVARIABLENAME) // this is pipeline variable name, in Capital letters
inputs:
commands: 'custom'
CustomCommand: 'run test'

npm Package

install package string-replace-loader

TypeScript/JavaScript File

Create a file with any name “test.ts”

test.ts
const test = () => {
const myVariable = "My-Variable";
};

Setup webpack.config.js

 module: {
rules: [
{
test: /test\.ts$/,
loader: 'string-replace-loader',
options: {
search: 'My-Variable',
replace: process.env['MyVariableName'] // from .yml env
}
}
]
}
}

Finally


"scripts" :{
"test": "webpack --config webpack.config.js"
}