As an operational engineer or any developer, you should be familiar with the concepts revolving around serverless computing. The development of a serverless application enables you to focus on the application code rather than worry about the operation and the management of the infrastructure.
In software and technology, Serverless denotes that the machine doesn’t require space on the server. The whole serverless is a connected entity, so its kinds have two different terms but comparable meanings.
What is Azure, and What are its functions?
Azure is an experience powered by events that broaden the conventional Azure application platform on demand. An azure function can implement code activated by events in Azure applications or other third-party applications located on a cloud or on-site basis. Like any web application development service, several software developers can connect data to several sources via the use of Azure functions. Azure functions also have messaging solutions that simplify the process and take action on events’ occurrences. Web application development services can easily establish HTTP-based API endpoints using Azure functions for easy access to a broad variety of mobile and IoT-based apps.
Steps of Building your first Serverless Web Application in Azure
1. Set the environment: To build your first Serverless Web Application in Azure, you need to have an active and valid Azure account in Microsoft Azure Account. A free Azure account (Limited) can be used, or a pay-out can be made when going into your account.
After you have created an Azure account and subscribed, you can start with following the below-mentioned guidelines to build your first Serverless Web Application in Azure:
2. Resource Group Creation: You need to create a resource group to make the access controls easy to implement, monitor operation, and track expenses for certain workloads. The resource group is a kind of container with relevant management azure resources that makes its management process easier.
The decision relies on your or your Web Application development company, who knows the best about how you want to allocate the resources to the resource groups of Azure. For this, you can also assign resources with a like lifecycle to a similar azure group so that you can quickly deploy and update them as groups and delete them as a group.
3. Virtual Network: Secondly, you can create a virtual network to allow Azure resources to connect securely, on-the-spot and on-site. You can divide your VNet into several sub networks for organization and security. The virtual network is a quintessential building block for your private Azure network’s core.
4. Create an ‘API Subnet’ virtual subnet containing the code and the connected APIs. Then create a “Static Content Subnet” Virtual Subnet, which includes the static cloud content. Generally, by default, there are no security limits between subnetworks so that resources can communicate in each of those subnetworks.
5. Nonetheless, you can establish a Network Security Group (NSG) that can govern the flow of traffic from and to subnetworks and resources. The NSG or the Network Security Group also contains rules on safety that authorize or disallow inbound traffic on the network from numerous Azure resources or outgoing network traffic. A user can connect to make its azure subscription and build up its network infrastructure on the Azure cloud. You can proceed with the implementation of your applications after the network infrastructure is ready.
6. You would then require to create a Blob Object storage account to store the data. A Blob Object Storage account is an Azure resource for saving tables, blobs, queues, files, and virtual machine drives.
7. A Function app creation for the features to be used and grouped as a logical device to facilitate the management, scaling, deployment, and resource sharing. A serverless computing option is a function application. A function application helps employs an event-driven model, with a trigger invoking a piece of code, i.e., (a “function”).
8. To store unstructured and JSON data, you must build an Azure Cosmo DB 6 account with far less code than is needed to keep data in a regular database, making it easier to save data quickly and easily. An Azure Cosmo DB is a database service with many designs. In response to HTTP GET customer requests, the application function collects documentation from Cosmos DB for this case.
Generally, Cosmo DB can be a relatively good option for any serverless app, requiring sub-millisecond response times and scaling fast and internationally.
9. Then you need to develop an API Management that gives an API gateway to the HTTP feature. Utilize API Management to launch and administer APIs that customers use.
10. Creates an Active Directory in which users sign up using the Azure AD credentials in the Web application. Azure AD delivers a web application-authenticated API request access token for the API.
11. Authentication configuration:
- Enter your Azure AD tenant’s application. This produces a login URL with the application ID that the client includes.
- Enable authentication of Azure AD in the Function app.
- To prepare the request by verifying the authentication code, add a validation policy to the API management.
Individual application logs for the Client Application and the Primary API in Azure AD should be created. You should also provide permission to call the API to the client’s request. This technique allows you to define several APIs and clients and to govern each authorization.
12. Start creating Delivery Network (CDN) to assure delivery in tactically positioned physical nodes through cache application content worldwide.
We hope that this article would have provided an insight into the process of building your web supplication. You can hire any web Application Development Company or web application development services to develop your first Serverless Web Application on Azure.
About The Author
Prashant Pujara
Prashant Pujara is the CEO of MultiQoS Technologies Pvt. Ltd., a leading Web and Mobile App Development Company specialized in iOS and android app development services. He has more than 10 years’ experience in Web development with a strong focus on mobile app development for all kinds of platforms including iOS and Android.
