Access Office 365 Exchange Online Mailbox with Client Credential Flow

As of this writing, Microsoft has disabled the basic authentication to Exchange Online, the alternate more secure method to authenticate and access Exchange Online is via Client Credential flow using OAuth token. OAuth (OIDC) Client Credential flow is typically used for background (eg. windows services or daemon) process without interaction with user.

Microsoft provides different APIs to access Exchange Online. To authenticate against these APIs, we need OAuth access token with appropriate permissions when invoking these APIs. And this type of access token is obtained from Azure AD.

Create Sharepoint Site with Azure Function using PowerShell

Business Case

Create SharePoint site based on user requirement without SharePoint Admin manually performing the task.

Design

A SharePoint List is created and shared with designated users to enter the desired SharePoint site criteria. Using an Azure function with PnP PowerShell module (compatible with PowerShell core in Azure function) to periodically check if any new entry in the SharePoint List and create SharePoint site based on the user entered criteria.

Inserting and Hosting 551 Millions Records Cheaply - Case Study

Recently I worked on a pet project with cloud implementation. There was a dump file in text format with 551 million line of records which needs to be stored in a way where filtered results could be quickly returned from a query, and with a goal of low cost implementation.

The dataset is static. Large number of records. No relational requirement. The storage and querying has to be fast and low cost. Azure table storage seems to be a good candidate for this purpose. Azure table storage is a NoSQL key value store and is very cheap.