To understand if PS Universal fits my requirement

1

Hello,

I am new to this forum. I am currently evaluating PS Universal as a potential candidate in our organisation to add a front end to our existing PowerShell automation. Before I pitch my idea to the management to purchase PSU, I wanted a few things clarified.

To give a brief intro, we have a PS automation that looks up archive files with 50+ millions of records. It involves copying down massive zip files from a share, extracting them and looking up matching records. We use runspace factory to throttle 15 parallel extractions so as to utilise the hosts CPU, memory and disk performance while also speeding up the job. An average job runs for several hours. It is currently launched by our 2nd line support. It has been working great but we would like to hand over the whole extraction process to the end users themselves and hence would like to place this automation behind a web front end.

I have watched PS Universal training videos on YouTube and it looks like a perfect match for us to develop a solution to match our requirement (i.e., for someone who is not an expert web developer).

So, I will list my precise questions so someone with good knowledge of PSU can answer?

  1. Our existing solution is hosted in our on-prem AD infrastructure, so we would like to use Integrated Windows Authentication. We do not want the hassle of managing the locally stored credentials(even for admins). Security is very strict at our place. We are going to host the solution on Windows Server 2022 (PS 5.1). So, is it possible to have this set up in PSU with preferably 2 AD groups (Admins and standard End Users) mapped to the PSU roles?

  2. Is Kestrel/Windows service option PSU offers out of the box enough for our set up or do we need to place it behind IIS?

  3. Due to the demanding host resources for the extraction job, we want only one request to be allowed at a point in time. If a second user tries to use the app in the interim, it should ask them to try again later. Is this possible with PSU?

Thank you

2

Hey Neo,

I recently went through a similar evaluation process for our enterprise. A big factor in our decision was the pricing. We’re a mid-sized company and management barely batted an eye in terms of cost.

To answer your questions:
1- Yes, this is very easy to do. You can review the docs here:

(Note: I noticed a small bug where, as an admin, you cannot see the roles assigned to a user in the Identities page, however the user still receives the role. Take note if you follow this method)

2- If your web front is not displaying all the data being processed, Kestrel will be plenty.

3- Yes, there would be a few ways to handle this. One PSU-native method would be to use the Cache scope to map a variable. See more here:

I’d recommend setting up a test VM, grabbing a trial license (14 days), and playing around with the platform to see if it fits your needs. For our case, I also spun up an instance in my home lab to develop a few POCs to show to management and familiarize myself with the platform. It proved fruitful!

1 Like
3

Thank you, I will give it a go in our test environment. I am sure I will be back here asking more questions soon :slight_smile: