Recently I wanted to make a Microsoft flow process to create channels in Microsoft Teams once a project is ready to start.  If the channel was already there then I wanted a message to be posted to the Teams channel saying that the project was ready, but that it didn’t need to create the channel.  So in programming terms I wanted a loop, with an IF statement inside the loop. Then if the loop got to the end of the downloaded set and there was no match it should do something.

Now Microsoft Flow doesn’t include anything to do this, so I had to get a little creative.

As I was looking through Microsoft Flow I found that you could use Variables within a Microsoft Flow application, and this made things suddenly click.  At the begining of the Flow I initiazlited a variable; in this case called “FoundClientInTeams”.

From here I setup a pull from Teams that would pull down all the channels for a team.  That was passed to an “Apply to Each” object, which is basically a “FOR” loop.

Within that “Apply to Each” object there’s a Condition that looks to see if the client name that we’re looking for exists or not.  If the channel exists (according to the condition) then the flow sends a message and changes the variable from false to true.  (There’s a “No” block of this condition that doesn’t do anything.)

After the “Apply to Each” there’s another Condition block, which checks to see if the varaiblehas been reset if needed. If the value is still false, that means that there was no match found, so we need to create the channel.  Is also posts a message saying that it created the channel, so there’s some debugging going on as well. The “No” side of the condition is left blank, so if the channel is found the varible is changed, and this condition should fail and nothing should be done at this point.

As I was working on this, I’m shocked to find that Microsoft flow is as poweful as it is.  What we’re doing in this case, is that when a document is updated on our SharePoint O365 site (in our case the SOW status), Microsoft Flow sees the change, and them either creates a new channel for the client if they are a new client, or just posting a message if they are an existing client.  Because we were able to automate this task, its one less thing that we need to do when we sign an SOW for a client.

Denny

The post Doing something in a loop in Microsoft flow, and something else if there’s no match appeared first on SQL Server with Mr. Denny.

I was recently in Silicon Valley for Cloud Field Day 6, and one of the companies we met with with HashiCorp. HashiCorp is known mostly for two key products in cloud automation–Terraform and Vault which enable cloud automation, and secrets management respectively. Both of these are open source projects, which have support  and premium feature offerings for companies and are free to get started with for individuals.  Both of these products are considered best of class, and are widely used by many organizations.

We had the honor of hearing from the founder and CTO of HashiCorp, Mitchell Hashimoto, who spoke to us about Consul, a service based networking tool for dynamic infrastructure (this means things like containers, Kubernetes, and serverless cloud services). Mitchell explained that companies are trying to apply on-premises networking paradigms to cloud infrastructure doesn’t really work.

Consul steps in, how can make this simpler.

• Service Registry & Health Monitoring
• Network Middleware Automation
• Zero trust network with service mesh

The goal of the product is easier adoption, crawl, walk, run, earlier adoption. It lets you ID what’s deployed in every single platform–registry does that. Consult provides a unified view for both DNS, and API and provides active health monitoring. It also builds catalog of your entire network. Consul launched in 2014, 50,000+ agents, most widely deployed service discovery tool on AWS. Servers form a cluster and do leader election. All membership is via gossip. Consult requires one server cluster per data center. Separate gossip pool,  the open source edition requires fully connected network, while the enterprise edition allows for hub and spoke topologies.

Consul also provides a number of other services like traffic splitting, which allows you do rolling deployment of application code, while sending a small percentage of traffic to the newly released version of your app, in order to check for errors.

Consul is unique tool–networking in containers and serverless is very challenging, and this product brings it together with old school technology like mainframes and physical servers. Also, given HashiCorp’s record with their other products, I expect this one to be really successful.

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend Cloud Field Day #6 in Silicon Valley. Along with 11 other brilliant delegates, we got the chance to meet with a variety of companies in the cloud computing space. I’m going to be writing about each of them in the coming weeks, but I’m going to start out by talking about a company we met with on our first day Morpheus Data.

A quote from the presentation that I thought was a really good description of their product was “we help big companies act like startups”. Morpheus’ product is combination of a service catalog, provisioning system, along with configuration management and CI/CD deployment. It’s not a full on CI/CD tool, but it integrates with all of the most common ones.

Morpheus allows you to also manage tasks like monitoring, logging, and backup. The amazing thing to me was the number of connectors that the product supported. The cloud integration here was interesting–you could show back pricing of a cloud stack, migrate workloads between clouds dynamically, and enable cloud deployment of both infrastructure and code. In addition to these cloud offerings, it’s possible to deploy to physical servers as the product includes a PXE boot engine.

I think the thing that impressed the attendees most about Morpheus was the number of integrations the product offered. Some of the other tools in this space are vRealize Automation from VMWare and ServiceNow. I feel as though the integrations and ease of moving to an infrastructure as code model is Morpheus’ strong point. As much as we talk about infrastructure as code, it’s really hard for larger organizations to move in unison in this direction. So having a product that can work with existing tools, while offering benefits on it’s own, can be a real benefit to a lot of organizations.

While the GUI (SSMS) has UNLIMITED in there, that’s actually not the right answer here. If you set the truncation log file to UNLIMITED and click save, it’ll actually reset the maximum file size to 2TB, since that’s actually the max supported size of a transaction log file.

So how to do create a single transaction bigger than 2 TB? You have multiple transaction log files. Also, don’t create 2TB transactions. If those fail, rollback is going to take a LONG time.

Denny

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