Tips for Improving Workflow and Development time in Power BI

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

3. Static Elastic IP: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/ec2-associate-static-public-ip/

4. Security Group: Open ports 22 and 3389

5. Remote Desktop Connection: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/connecting_to_windows_instance.html

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.

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