T4T Labs - Developing and Deploying Web Apps on Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure Overview for Developers

In this module you will get a broad overview of Azure, and the different options for getting your applications in the cloud.

• Overview of Microsoft Azure
• Usage Scenarios
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Pricing
• The Azure Management Portals
• Azure Components

App Service Plans

When creating web, API or mobile applications. The content you provide has to be served somewhere with certain requirements, like CPU, memory, scaling, ... . Microsoft has created Service Plans to allow you to easily decide on the capacity you may need. The service plan itself determines the region, scaling and instance size of your app services. In short, a service plan defines the resources you might possibly need to host your application as well as which datacenter to host them in, the more resources you need, the higher the price.

• What is an App Service?
• Purpose of service plans
• Creating a service plan
• Scaling a service plan
• Moving and cloning apps to other service plans

App Services: Web Apps

Adding your website or API to Azure can easily be done with Web apps. In this module, you will learn how to create them, and the different deployment options.

• Deploying from Visual Studio
• Configuring app settings, SSL, domain names and backup scheduling
• Monitoring your Web App
• Running/testing locally
• Spinning up more website instances
• How to implement traffic routing for A/B testing
• LAB: Festival Web App

Storing your data in the Cloud

There will often be the need to store data in the cloud. Microsoft offers different ways of storing data within a Storage Account depending on what kind of data you would like to store. In this module, you will learn more about the storage options available to you in Microsoft Azure: things like Blob, File and Table-storage and how to implement them into your website.

• Advantages of storing data in the cloud
• Microsoft Azure storage concepts
• Storage APIs: Blob, File, Table and Queue
• Securing your storage with Shared Access Signatures
• Using the Azure CDN in your websites to serve your assets
• LAB: Storing Festival Pictures

Brokered Messaging in the cloud

An important part for messaging in the cloud is the Service Bus. This one has different options like Relaying, Notification Hubs, IoT Hubs, etc..In this module, the focus is on Queues, Topics and Subscriptions. These can be used for sending messages between the different parts of your cloud application.

• Using Service Bus Queues for decoupling applications
• Dispatching messages with Topics and Subscriptions
• Adding filters to Subscriptions

Serverless Computing with Azure Functions

In certain cases, the only thing you need, is just a piece of code that has to be executed. You don't care about the big picture, i.e., the hardware, scaling, language, ... You just need it to execute somewhere based on some event, like an HTTP call, a file was added to storage container, a message was added to a Service Bus Queue, ... This is also referred to as serverless computing. Microsoft Azure offers Azure Functions as a way to provide serverless computing.

• Serverless Azure Functions
• Development Environments
• Triggers and Bindings
• Hosting and Scaling
• LAB: Moderate content using Functions and Cognitive Services

Azure SQL Database

Many business applications store their data behind the scenes in some relational database. When creating your applications in the cloud, several relational database systems exist. Azure SQL databases is Microsoft's way of providing relational databases in the cloud, without the need of setting up your own virtual machine with SQL server installed.

• Features and Service Tiers
• Azure SQL Server and Azure SQL Database
• Comparison with on-prem SQL
• Backups and Replication
• Authentication and Firewall
• LAB: Storing Structured Data in the Cloud

CI/CD with Azure DevOps

One of the options for deploying app services is by connecting to source code repositories. You will learn how to enable deployment from Azure DevOps, and how to enable continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD).

• DevOps Lifecycle
• Planning
• Build
• Release Management
• Auto-setup
• LAB: Adding a Web Project to Azure DevOps