Monday 15 May 2017

Azure - On-premises data gateways

Case
If you want to use on-premises data in Azure or Power BI you need to install a so called gateway. A quick search resulted in four possible gateway downloads! Which one do you need? It's so confusing!

Microsoft Gateways for Azure and Power BI








Solution
There are two different gateways but with several names, versions and purposes:
  • Data Management Gateway
    This gateway is used for Azure Data Factory and Azure Machine Learning, but it was also used for Power BI. However, Power BI now uses the On-premises data gateway! I think / hope that this gateway will be deprecated and replaced by the On-premises data gateway in the near future.
    Download (32 and 64bit): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39717
  • On-premises data gateway
    This gateway comes in three flavors, but you can only install one per server.

Use source for multiple online services
Since you can only install one gateway per server, the On-premises data gateway has some challenges if you want to use your on-premises source for multiple online services like Power BI and AAS or for two AAS servers. In that case you install the first gateway on the source server itself and a second gateway on a separate on-premises server that can reach the first source server. A bit expensive to a have a server running for a data gateway only, but for now this is the only solution.
One source and two online services: two servers with their own gateway



















Note: details per gateway will be posted in separate posts (AAS)