Using Azure Data Share and our new 'customer-specific Azure tenant' feature for setting up a data exchange

A customer of ours recently set up a data transfer from their Azure tenant to their AIMMS cloud account, using Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Share and our new feature to provide customer-specific Azure tenants linked to our cloud platform. In this post we will briefly explain how as it may also work for others.

Probably best to start with a diagram.

This solution relies on three features/technologies:

• As AIMMS we now offer customers the possibility to have their own Azure tenant in our cloud platform, called ‘AIMMS4CustomerXtenant’ in the diagram. In this tenant we, AIMMS, can deploy almost any Azure tenant. And this tenant can be securely connected with the AIMMS cloud account of that customer.
• Azure Data Share enables the secure syncing between two Azure storage services, without having to provide direct access from one tenant to the other.
• AIMMS Data Exchange Library (DEX) provides the REST Client to retrieve the data from the Azure storage into the AIMMS app.

Combined this enables the following flow.

1. The Azure Blob Storage in CustomerX’s Azure tenant holds the data that is to be sent to the AIMMS application. In this case the data is placed there from other sources, using data workflow.
2. Azure Data Share transfers that data securely to the Azure Blob Storage in the AIMMS4CustomerX tenant, keeping it exactly in sync with the source.
3. The AIMMS app uses a REST Client created with DEX to retrieve the data securely via the Azure backbone into identifiers in the AIMMS model and write the data to the local application database (MySQL). For now the access credentials are inserted manually. In future we will provide more automated mechanisms for that.

All this was set-up in a matter of days by the customer’s team and our Azure partner Intercept, in two instances: development and production versions. The customer will be invoiced by AIMMS for the Azure costs of the AIMMS4CustomerX tenant. And AIMMS charges a small set-up and managed-service fee for monitoring and maintenance.

If you want to explore this path for data exchange or have other ideas of Azure services you would like to add to your AIMMS apps in our cloud, please contact our User Support team (support@aimms.com).