AWS VPC Basics - How To Configure Security Using Subnets

In this article i will explain whats a "VPC", its uses and demonstrate how we can handle the networking & security using various components like VPCs, Subnets, Route tables.

Please know that i will spend little time on theory as it was better explained in AWS Documentation. We will go deep in implementing in a step-by-step manner.

We will :
1. Define AWS Components like VPC, Subnet, Route table, EC2 instance, S3.
2. Configure VPC
3. Configure Subnets
4. Setting Rout Tables
5. Creating EC2 instances in various subnets
6. Testing security we setup.
7. Talk little bit about VPC endpoints.

Let me start with a design of what we will be creating.

AWS FreeTier Subscription - First 4 Things You Need To Do

As a AWS Free-Tier user you are entitled for lot of free compute power.

This is AWS way of saying "Please experiment and learn".

But expirements go wrong sometimes. In this case they can go really bad if you are not carefull.

Here are the 4 things you need to do first after signingup for AWS Free-Tier subscription.

#1. Set billing alert.

#2. Enable MFA

#3. Delete root account access keys

#4. Bring IAM dashboard's "Security Status" to all Green 5/5

Ok, i will take you through each change and explain you why.

AWS Lambda Function - How to Create - Test - Run

We are not going to talk about how AWS Lambda are server less and how usefull they are or where does Lambda functions fit in your solutions.

AWS Documentation is there to explain way better than i do. Here is the Link.

We are here to 

1. Create IAM User, assign permissions

2. Create your first Lambda function. 

3. Understand the code.

4. Test the code.

5. Access and Execute Lambda function from AWS CLI

6. Understand how to pass parameters when calling Lambda function.

7. Error Handling and Logging.

Lets keep the code simple to maximize understanding of concept behind.

Microservices Introduction - Monolith Vs Microservices

This post is a beginning of a long series which will cover Microservices, Devops, Containers, Dockers and many other futuristic concepts.

All these concepts are vast and range from simple to complex implementations. So let’s take it slow.

We should learn about Monolith application before learning about Microservices.

Monolith Application

This is the regular way of application development we followed earlier. Typical 3 tier application with Presentation Layer, Business Layer, Data Access Layer. Below image explains what we call a Monolith application.

Microsoft Flow Basic Sharepoint Interactions

Objective: In this post we will look at basics of Microsoft Flow performing Sharepoint list operations.

We always drive our discussion based on a use-case. Below are the two scenarios we will consider for this post. 

1. Action based on a item creation or update

2. Action on list of items filtered from a list based on a condition. 

As i mentioned earlier, this is for Flow newbies with basic  Sharepoint interactions.

Adaptive Cards in Bot Framework

If you are new to Bot development, you better check Basics from my earlier post.

As mentioned in earlier post we will learn various components that can be used for better interactions with users. As part of it we will look at Adaptive Cards, shown below.

And also how to handle the events generated from actions in adaptive cards.

From above mentioned Basics article, you should be able to create a bot and can test it in emulator.

Now i will show you a basic adaptive card.

Basics of Bot Development

What is a Bot?
To begin with , If i think i can give better conventional explanation than Microsoft about "What is a BOT?", I will be an idiot.  Check here for that conventional stuff.
But, i have funny way to begin this series.

Got it ?
Jokes aside, The way we have a automated robot to do regular checks and clean the dust, the same way an app which performs some moderate to intelligent tasks without human intervention is a BOT. This can free man hours for better job, "Imagining and Thinking".

Sharepoint Online Authentication for API Access using POSTMAN

Objective: We know most of the collaboration part of sharepoint has been pushed to Teams, with its planner, conversations, a dedicated site for document uploads and many other features.
So the sharepoint site is now used mostly for document management. Being said that how we can accomodate SPO API for other applications.

In this post we will use SP Online OOTB API to upload and download a file. We dont need to write a seperate application for this, instead we will use POSTMAN to interpret the calls.

When API is avilable OOTB why do we need this post?
Well Service API is available OOTB, but there is specific way we need to authenticate to use that API. That is what we are going to show here.

Let me give a highlevel overview of how authentication works in Office365 Sharepoint site in this case.

React Component Life Cycle

What is your favorite technical article?

For me, Understanding ASP.Net View State is my all time favorite article. I might have read it hundred's of times. It helped me all my career as a dot.net & sharepoint developer.

so, when we have our basics clear, complex tasks will be easy to handle. So the same applies for REACT as well.

Example: 
I have recently worked on a SPFX webpart integration with JqueryUI.

React Component Basics

For this post , i assume you are familiar with basics of SharePoint framework development, using yoman templates , node package manager and gulp. Else please refer to my earlier post Basics of SPFX

Sharepoint Framework (SPFX) is becoming popular as it is the only way to add custom functionality to a Sharepoint Online modern pages.

We can integrate any java script framework to work with SPFX. In last post we did integrate Angular with SPFX.  But, we need to do everything from scratch like importing packages and then adding them in config files, etc.

REACT is one of the java script framework which comes with yoman scaffold out of the box. So the installation, references and default code were taken care by yoman generator. React got lot of plugin support and its consistently improving by each version.

So REACT became a mandatory component to learn for SPFX development.

REACT coding is mostly dealing with properties and state on client side. 

For this we have 2 types of components in REACT.