There’s a few different approaches for connecting your cloud infrastructure to your on-premise data sources. With that in mind I had some spare time this weekend to check out the approach of the on-premise data gateway architecture:

On premises data gateway

Reading and learning about the different approaches is interesting, but in the end the most rewarding is actually trying things and getting your hands dirty. What I ended up trying:

  • Installed and configured the on premise data gateway on a computer
  • Created a Logic App
  • In the Logic App: Configured the File System connector to connect to a shared folder (on-prem)
  • In the Logic App: Get files on the located on the shared folder
  • Created an Azure Function
  • From the Logic App: Posted the content of the file to the Azure Function
  • In the Logic App: Configured the SQL Server connector to connect to a database (on-prem)
  • From the Logic App: Inserted the content of the response from the Azure Function to the on-prem database

The installation and configuration of the on-premises gateway is described here. It is pretty straight forward to get the gateway up and running. Following the guide you find that you also have to create a On-premises Data Gateway in Azure if you want to use Azure Logic Apps to connect to you on-premise data sources.

There are settings for high availability (clustering) and settings for configuring proxy setting. Another thing thats good about this data gateway is that all traffic originates as secured outbound traffic from the gateway agent. From my experience - if you can prevent inbound connections to on-premises data sources, it’s going to be a lot easier to get your new architecture through security reviews.

All in all - time well spent this weekend!