I work in a small company and we develop PowerBI dashboards for a few clients. Data sources tend to change with each client from MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, Excel etc. Most clients want to setup scheduled refreshes but in order to do that we need a Data Gateway. So far i've used my machine as a gateway but that requires my computer to be on all the time which is not ideal. Since our clients data is usually stored in their own networks I believe we need an enterprise data gateway to manage all those scheduled refreshes for our current and future projects.
We don't have any physical on prem infrastructure, most of the company's developemnts are managed through AWS linux cloud servers. From what I've read a possible solution is to have a VM running 24/7 with the enterprise data gateway installed, although this seems a bit expensive taking into consideration Azure VM prices. Is there any other solution to my situation or is a VM the only path I can take?
There is no other option available, On prem data gateway requires installation and configuration to connect your data sources to powerBI, for this we require onprem machine or a VM in azure.
As you are aware the recommended machine configuration is:
An 8-core CPU
8 GB of memory
A 64-bit version of Windows 8 or Server 2012 R2 or later
Solid-state drive (SSD) storage for spooling.
If in case, your resources are running in azure you can use vnet data gateway,It doesn’t require any installation Create virtual network data gateways