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Tips for Improving Workflow and Development time in Power BI

Updated: Aug 25, 2021


Here’s a quick tip I found – use a persistent spot windows server instance on AWS with OneDrive. This sped up my development time and workflow considerably!

If you are new to AWS I recommend this Medium blog post by Tim Fogarty for a start. Getting started with AWS. https://medium.com/tfogo/getting-started-with-aws-d7c51133fc92.


Here is the base architecture we will be installing our applications from:

The key things we need for this configuration and setup are:


1. Persistent Spot EC2 Instance (to reduce costs)


2. AMI type: Windows_Server-2019-English-Full-Base-2021.06.09



4. Security Group: Open ports 22 and 3389



Once connected to your instance, you can now install and configure your applications: OneDrive, PowerBI Desktop, R/RStudio, Node, and PowerShell (for custom R visuals)


After installation, I saved my remote desktop connection file (.rdp) to OneDrive so I could access this instance on any device I was working on.


In the comments section - Please let me know how this works for you or any other tips you found to reduce your development time.

 



Jerome is a Senior Operations Research Analyst here at CANA. You can contact Jerome at jdixon@canallc.com.

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2 Comments


Daniel Widdis
Daniel Widdis
Aug 26, 2021

Great post. I'm curious about the choice to combine OneDrive (served by servers in the same datacenters as Azure instances) with an AWS server instance. Is there a benefit to splitting the workflow across two separate clouds? I expect the difference may be negligible but I'm wondering if you have considered/benchmarked any Azure server instances with this setup.

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Jerome Dixon
Jerome Dixon
Sep 28, 2021
Replying to

Decision to go with AWS was purely a time issue. I had already developed my backend analysis pipeline with AWS Lambda and S3. Didn’t want to refactor or add new complexity. That being said..PowerBI (and OneDrive if enabled) is caching to local environment..why PowerBI was getting slow on my local laptop..so we shouldn’t have any issues using the two clouds. I have been pretty focused on learning the ins and outs of AWS Lambda and all the various integrations. Eventually I will get to the same in Azure. Great question. Thanks for asking!

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