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Generating Azure OAuth2 Access Token By Python

There are two modern ways to generate an Azure OAuth2 access token using Python: one is by using the MSAL library, and the other is by using the Azure Identity library, which is based on the former.

There're also other ways to get the token, like using the requests or aiohttp libraries etc. to send a POST request to the Azure OAuth2 token endpoint, but it's not recommended. As the MSAL and Azure Identity libraries are the official libraries provided by Microsoft, they are more secure and easier to use. For e.g. they handle token caching, token refreshing, and token expiration automatically. Furthermore, some of the credential types are difficult (too many code) to be implemented by raw requests or aiohttp.

Getting all users from MS Graph API in few seconds

MS Graph API's endpoint for retrieving users, GET /users can return all users of the tenant. The default limit is 100 users per page, and the maximum limit is 999 users per page. If there are more than 999 users, the response will contain a @odata.nextLink field, which is a URL to the next page of users. For a big company having a large number of users (50,000, 100,000, or even more), and it can be time-consuming to retrieve all users.

While MS Graph API provides generous throttling limits, we should find a way to parallelize the queries. This post explores sharding as a strategy to retrieve all users in a matter of seconds. The idea is to get all users by dividing users based on the first character of the userPrincipalName field.For instance, shard 1 would encompass users whose userPrincipalName starts with a, shard 2 would handle users starting with b, and so forth.