Redshift Scheduled Refresh without a Gateway...?

[stevenc]

Hello

New to Power BI so lots of questions!  First one...

Is it possible to treat Redshift more like an online service and connect direct from the Power BI Service rather than through a gateway?  Would mean having to setup connectivity between the Power BI Service and our Redshift cluster but I was sort of hoping that if we became a Premium customer there might be a way of setting up connectivity that was specific to our instance rather than the whole of the service?

My interest is because all the rest of our data is in the cloud and being able to treat Redshift this way would eliminate the need for us to host anything at all (plus I'm guessing performance would be better).

Any pointers appreciated.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

@stevenc,

Since Redshift is a cloud service, there is no need to use gateway to refresh the dataset, Power BI service will directly connect to Redshift to keep your reports up to date, for more details, please review the following blog.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-support-for-amazon-redshift-reports-in-the-power...

Regards,

[Anonymous]

Hi, Redshift is cloud service but not  always is publicly accessible. It depends of the organization´s architecure and security policies. 
In our case we have a cluster of AWS Redshift running on a private network on AWS cloud and it means that it is not accessible by internet.  We have the same scenario with an AWS RDS (Oracle Database) but, with Oracle Database, we area able to connect through the gateway installed on a Windows Server machine running on the same private network. 

I realy think it was a bad mistake of Microsoft  that don´t develop a redshift  connector for the Gateway. And the argument that a Gateway is not required because it is a cloud service demonstrates immaturity in this type of architecture.

I have been talking to some Microsoft representatives and it seems that there is no alternative but to expose the Redshift database to the internet. In this case this would bring us a considerable security vulnerability.

So, we had to stop the project and maybe rethink the whole architecture due this security gap.

[stevenc]

Thanks for this.  So it is possible in theory but in practice it's nessecary to manitain a weekly changing list of Azure public IP addresses...?

[Anonymous]

@stevenc,

Yes. If you are blocking outbound IP traffic, it's necessary to whitelist the Azure Datacenter IP addresses. There is a similar thread for your reference.

http://community.powerbi.com/t5/Service/Firewall-setup-IP-used-by-Power-BI-Service-during-data-refre...

Regards,
Lydia