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Evaluating the migration of Azure Functions to Microsoft Flow – Twitter IoT Integration

 

Introduction

Almost 18 months ago I wrote this post on integrating Twitter with Azure Functions to Tweet IoT data. A derivative of that solution has been successfully running for about the same period. Azure Functions have been bullet proof for me.

After recently implementing Microsoft Flow as detailed in my Teenager Notification Device post here I started looking at a number of the Azure Functions I have running and looked at what would be better suited to being implemented with Flow. What could I simplify by migrating to Microsoft Flow?

The IoT Twitter Function linked above was one the simpler Functions I had running that I’ve transposed and it has been running seamlessly. I chose this particular function to migrate as the functions it was performing were actions that Microsoft Flow supported. Keep in mind (see the Summary), that there isn’t a one size fits all. Flow and Functions each have their place and often work even better together.

Comparison

Transposing the IoT Twitter Function App to Microsoft Flow provided me with the same outcome, however the effort to get to that outcome is considerably less. As a quick comparison I’ve compared the key steps I needed to perform with the Azure Function to enable the integration vs what it took to implement with Microsoft Flow.

Function vs Flow.PNG

That’s pretty compelling. For the Azure Function I needed to register an App with Twitter and I needed to create an Azure Function App Plan to host my Azure Function. With Microsoft Flow I just created a Flow.

To setup and configure the Azure Function I needed to set up Deployment Options to upload the Twitter PowerShell Module (this is the third-party module), and I needed to store the two credential sets associated with the Twitter Account/App. In Microsoft Flow I just chose Twitter as an Action and provided conscent to the oAuth2 challenge.

Finally for the logic of the Azure Function I had to write the script to retrieve the data, manipulate it, and then post it to Twitter. In Microsoft Flow it was simply a case of configuring the workflow logic.

Microsoft Flow

As detailed above, the logic is still the same. On a schedule, get the data from the IoT Devices via a RestAPI, manipulate/parse the response and output a Tweet with the environment info. Doing that in Flow though means selection of an action and configuring it. No code, no modules, no keys.

Below is a resultant Flow (overview) to achieve the same result as my Azure Function that I originally implemented as an Azure Function as detailed here.

MS Flow - Twitter.PNG

The schedule part is triggered hourly. Using Recurrence it is easy to set the schedule (much easier than a CRON format in Azure Functions) complete with timezone (within the advanced section). I then get the Current time to allow me to acquire the Date and Time in a format that I will use in the resulting tweet.

Schedule

Next is to perform the first RestAPI call to get the data from the first of the IoT devices. Parse the JSON response to get the temperature value.

GET

Repeat the above step for the other IoT Device located in a different environment and parse that. Formulate the Tweet using elements of information from the Flow.

Repeat and Tweet

Looking at Twitter we see a resultant Tweet from the Flow.

Tweet.PNG

Summary

This is a relatively simple flow. Bare in mind I haven’t included any logic to validate what is returned or perform any conditional operations during processing. But very quickly it is possible to retrieve, manipulate and output to a different medium.

So why don’t I used Flow for everything? The recent post I mentioned at the beginning for the Teenager Notification Device that also used a Flow, also uses an Azure Function. For that use case the integration of the IoT Device with Azure IoT is via MQTT. There isn’t currently that capability in Flow. But Flow was used to initiate an Action of initiating a trigger for an Azure Function that in turn sent an MQTT message to an IoT Device. The combination of Flow with Functions provides a lot of flexibility and power.

 

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A Twitter Management Agent for Microsoft Identity Manager

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been evaluating a number of different approaches/concepts for some upcoming MIM development projects. Some of these I’ve blogged about already.

Having an Identity Manager Metaverse with identity data is a key dependency to being able to validate ideas and concepts. So what’s a good source of some interesting and varied identity data with string, integer, reference, and boolean attributes? Twitter? Yeah why not. There’s an API. Should be pretty quick to get some sample data right?

In this blog post I’m going to give an overview of creating a PowerShell Management Agent to consume Twitter identities and their data into Microsoft Identity Manager. I’ll cover;

  • Obtaining Twitter user data from Twitter using Powershell and the Twitter RestAPI
  • Using Søren’s Powershell Management Agent to import Twitter user data obtained via the RestAPI
  • Manipulating the Twitter data into the MIM Synchronisation Engine

Twitter Data

Here’s an overview of my approach/rationale of what data I was looking for and how I got it from Twitter;

  • I don’t need real-time data. Just identity data
  • I need data of all different data-types
  • I need data with all the randomness that identity data often contains
  • I created a standalone script that took a seed Twitter identity (one of my accounts) and;
    • obtained the Twitter account info including the list of the Twitter accounts it followed
    • the Twitter accounts that follows it
  • The standalone script uses the Twitter RestAPI to obtain the data and respected the service and rate-limits
  • To make the Twitter API calls easy I leveraged the awesome InvokeTwitterAPI Powershell Module from Shannon Conley & Mehmet Kaya available here https://github.com/MeshkDevs/InvokeTwitterAPIs . I notice that there is an updated version from Marc R Kellerman available here https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/InvokeTwitterAPIs/2.1/Content/InvokeTwitterAPIs.psm1 that was released after I had done most of my work. Notably it supports having multiple OAuth keys and the ratelimit restrictions. The details below leverage this updated version.

Here is what a sample of some of the data looks like in the Metaverse.

DataSample1.PNG

Pre-requisites

You need to enable your Twitter Account for API access. Follow the details here 

Getting the Seed Twitter account info

By now you should have downloaded the Twitter PowerShell API Modules and installed them. If you haven’t get WMF5 installed and run the install-module command as shown below in Line 1.

Modify the script below to give the;

  • Seed Twitter Account you want to bring in the Friends and Followers for as users into the MIM Metaverse
  • The API keys asscoiated with your Twitter account(s) you’re going to use to query the Twitter API
  • The directory you want to dump the account info out to

….. and let it loose.

Now we have two XML files with a whole bunch of Twitter accounts and their metadata. There is an almost certainty that the seed account you’ve used is both followed by twitter accounts that you also follow. We’re going to need to remove the duplicates so that when we import the Twitter accounts into MIM we don’t have duplicates.

Basic, basic script to read in both files and spit out the unique Twitter Accounts is shown below.

Using the Granfeldt PowerShell Management Agent to import Twitter Identities

Consuming data into the MIM Sync Engine obtained via PowerShell is quick and simple utilising Søren Granfeldt’s extremely versatile PowerShell Management Agent. I’m just going to cover importing the data from the XML file we generated above.

Getting Started with the Granfeldt PowerShell Management Agent

First up, you can get it from here. Søren’s documentation is pretty good but does assume you have a working knowledge of FIM/MIM and this blog post is no different.

A few items of note are;

  • You must have a Password.ps1 file. Even though we’re not doing password management on this MA, the PS MA configuration requires a file for this field. The .ps1 doesn’t need to have any logic/script inside it. It just needs to be present
  • Same for an Export.ps1 file. I’m not doing any exports on the MA, but an export script must be present.
  • The credentials you give the MA to run this MA are irrelevant as they aren’t used as part of the import as I’m bringing in data from files generated via separate PowerShell scripts
  • The path to the scripts in the PS MA Config must not contain spaces and be in old-skool 8.3 format. I’ve chosen to store my scripts in an appropriately named subdirectory under the MIM Extensions directory. Tip: from a command shell use dir /x to get the 8.3 directory format name. Mine looks like C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~2\2010\SYNCHR~1\EXTENS~2\Twitter

Import Twitter Users into Microsoft Identity Manager

Using the guidance above on the Granfeldt PSMA here are the two key scripts for the Twitter MA.

The Schema Script to expose the core Twitter identity attributes.

Schema Script

Import Script

The Import Script that takes the rationalised XML file created earlier from the friends and followers queries and populates the connector space.

Password Script

Required by the PSMA but not used as detailed earlier

Export Script

Required by the PSMA but not used as detailed earlier

Creating the Management Agent

Path to the Schema Script in 8.3 format as detailed earlier.

MA1

Path to the Import, Export and Password scripts also in 8.3 format.

MA2

Select the attributes you want to bring in to the connector space.

MA3

Any Join logic, and a Projection Rule.

MA4

Import Flow Rules to bring in the Tweeters.

MA5

Create your Run Profiles, perform a Stage and Full Sync and BAM; Tweeters in the Metaverse. Real Word Identity Data Ahoy. Exception testing commences now.

Follow Darren on Twitter @darrenjrobinson