About

In 2020, Red Badger engaged with the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to build from scratch the medicines and product portal https://products.mhra.gov.uk.

The project must use Azure as a cloud provider because it is the official UK Government provider for cloud services.

Part of the job to be done was to connect 4 microservices built with Rust to a service bus and at that time Azure neither have an official client or SDK for Rust, so we try to made our integrations using a simple HTTP request with Shared Access Signatures (SAS).

We found that authenticating and authorizing an application via Shared Access Signatures on Azure was quite convoluted and we thought that probably someone had done it before, and hopefully on Rust.

We found that Francesco Cogno, a Microsoft software developer and a Rust enthusiast, was starting with an not official Azure SDK for Rust and he had resolved Shared Access Signatures.

So as many of you know, we can import dependencies in Rust just declaring the repository URL and even set a branch to look.

So we forked his repo and started to extend his library to plug into Service Bus. Probably a week later (don’t remember the exact length), he and his team started to do the same thing.

We reached him and he was quite excited that his library was starting to be used in a real project. We suggested that we can make a pull request from our fork and if his team was happy could integrate it. They did it. We finished the project and then we forgot about it.

In December 2020, Microsoft Azure GitHub organisation adopted Francesco’s work as part of their organisation https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-rust. And now our small contribution is part of Microsoft Azure SDK for Rust.