Looking for some advice on the best and cheapest way to host in azure and I’ve never used it before so I’m finding it fairly confusing if I’m honest. But here’s where I’m at...
I have a Vue.js front-end which calls an azure function back end (API in .net core using VS) which is connected to mysql workbench running as a windows service currently, which ultimately returns all data back to my front end.
I set up a free trial tonight, I’ve created a resource group and set up an azure function and pushed my API up to it. I then created an azure for mysql instance and managed to connect my DB up (again from mysql workbench running as a windows service) to my azure mysql instance and connected this also with credentials to my API.
I need to now host the Vue.js app and connect this to my azure function but how are the endpoints exposed ?
Also, I have registered a domain and I’d assume I’d have to connect this to the Vue.js app once it’s hosted but any tips ?
I need to keep this as cheap as possible.
One of the cheapest ways to host your website is using a Azure blob storage. You can set it up for static websites, I've done this a couple of times for Angular applications. blob documentation
As for exposing your API. Make sure that your Azure function has a http trigger and the correct authorization level. You can obtain an url as prescribed here.
Please let me know if you need anything else :).
Related
The question I have is can you use the Microsoft Bot Framework service via an on-premise solution through, ideally a docker container, ~~or at least an Azure Stack installation~~ (not available currently through azure stack)? We need a 100% on premise solution that will utilize LUIS and other Azure services but still be on-premise when utilizing the chat bot.
The problem is the bot almost requires a solution that is through the direct line api which authenticates through a token. This token is generated through an azure service, if it's not the secret, and the direct line api is through a registered bot application through an azure service.
Although there is LUIS container support, meaning a localized docker container that can pull down azure cognitive services and use them through that container, there doesn't seem to be any support for the bot framework service. Which just seems bizarre to not have one without the other.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/cognitive-services-container-support
But, that's ok if utilizing an Azure stack that would perhaps solve a lot of on premise solutions. It could even be the hybrid variation where lLis and other aspects are through traditional cloud services but the bot service has to be on premise and able to utilize the direct Line api. If possible. Or what is another solution?
Would it have to be traditional restful api calls and what would be missing from a deployed nodejs or C# bot to the cloud. Perhaps I am missing something in the architecture but the need described is 100% off premise
You will want to look into offline DirectLine. This is an unoffical package, but it is open source.
I have been doing quite a bit of research into Azure's various offerings and what they can do, however, it is quite hard to figure out how they might fit together. I have set up a Mobile Service to act as my mobile app's back-end, managing push notifications and data storage etc. This populates a SQL database I have provisioned, all good so far. However, I would now like to display this data in a dashboard type web app. Do I create a private API and host it on another Azure App Service and call it from a separate web app which populates a dashboard, or populate the dashboard directly by querying the SQL database? Not sure of the security implications of either set up, or implementation issues?
Azure App Service can combine both mobile and web components. You didn't mention the preferred language, but ASP.NET (MVC5) and Node.js are supported for the mobile component.
If you have not started using the Mobile Service in production, add the Mobile Apps SDK to your website, update the client SDK to point to the Mobile Apps SDK and just have one site.
Refs for the Server SDKs:
* node
* ASP.NET
Your best bet here is probably to create an empty Web App Service (Website) and have the Mobile Service populate the data on this website, in order to visualize it.
So keep the Mobile Service you have now, and connect it to a new website.
I am currently doing some research for the development of a mobile application for our company that should support offline data sync (on an iPad). We have explored many possibilities including PhoneGap/Cordova, Xamarin and simply native iOS development. Xamarin, for many different reasons, seems to be our best choice, so my question will assume we will develop in Xamarin.
I was looking into a library for managing offline data synchronization and the most obvious solution is Microsoft Azure MobileServices. However, my company is Canadian, and apparently it's hard to trust (legally) our data to clouds based in the US. Since we already deployed internally our WebApi on our intranet, I figured there was probably a way to point the MobileServices library to our own WebApi. I have read about the Azure Hybrid Connection possibility, but our data still conveying through Microsoft servers might not be a possibility. So, my question is this:
Is there a way to configure the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.MobileServices Client library to point directly to our intranet, RESTful WebApi backend, without going through any Microsoft Azure servers ?
I understand that, in order to be able to use the Client librairies seamlessly, we probably would have to adapt our WebApi to implement the necessary .net Backend interfaces. I'm mostly wondering if it's even possible as the MSDN documentation on the libraries all seem to point to direct connections to their servers (no possibilities to configure your own connection strings) and all instructions redirect you to their Azure Mobile Services website.
Thank you.
If you look at the API for your mobile client, you'll notice that the Azure Mobile Services Client SDK only cares about two things:
new AzureMobileClient( url, appkey)
...where it's hosted shouldn't be a concern. Everything else is just configuration.
If you want to host the Azure Mobile Services Backend on your own servers, technically you could do this, but there are likely a few caveats. Microsoft has announced that they will be launching a Canadian Azure data center, but we won't see it until 2016.
In the meantime, here's how you can host the services locally. Note that I have not tried to emulate all of the features of Azure Mobile Services (aka Zumo) so your mileage (or kilometerage) will vary.
Hosting Locally:
From a technical feasibility, you absolutely can run the services locally. I know this because you can create the Azure Mobile Services Backend project from within Visual Studio and run it locally for development purposes. This is what our development team does for testing their mobile applications.
Note that you can create the Azure Mobile Service backend directly from within Visual Studio: New Project -> Cloud -> Azure Mobile Service. You can also download the exact same template (pre-configured with your URL and ApplicationKey) directly from the Azure dashboard: Create -> Mobile Service.
Obviously, if you're hosting it on your server it will be up to you to configure and use a proper SSL certificate for your site.
ZUMO Permissions:
By default, the security roles on the server are turned off. So if you're locking down any of your methods using the [AuthorizeLevel] attribute these settings will be ignored at runtime. If you need to enable this feature you can do so by modifying the WebApiConfig.Register() method and marking the site as self-hosted: config.SetSelfHosted(true).
Configuration:
From a configuration perspective, the Azure Mobile Service dashboard provides several tabs for configuring Identity, Push Notifications, Connection Strings and App Settings. Sadly, you won't have a dashboard, but all of these settings have a corresponding value in the local web.config. Any value you provide here is automatically overwritten in Azure, but they're used when running locally.
The minimum settings you'll need to configure are listed here. The ApplicationKey you can distribute with your ZuMo client, but the MasterKey is for the Admin authorization level so you'll want to keep that secret. The MobileServiceName is used by the EntityFramework for your database schema and what appears in the URL of your site.
<add key="MS_MobileServiceName" value="myzumosite" />
<add key="MS_MasterKey" value="masterkey" />
<add key="MS_ApplicationKey" value="appkey" />
Values that start with a MS_ prefix map to corresponding values in the Azure Portal. MS_GoogleClientID and MS_GoogleClientSecret map to the Google Identity values in the dashboard, for example.
Any other value in the AppSettings node is immediately accessible via the ApiServices.Settings property and corresponds to the Settings node in the Azure dashboard.
Database connection strings continue to exist in the connectionStrings node. The same is true for azure notification hub.
Database:
Obviously, the database you configure will be up to you as well. Permissions and User accounts are also obvious. There may be some minor differences between the SQL Azure syntax for Entity Framework database migration scripts that you'll need to worry about. (I've discovered the database migration scripts don't work from the Package Manager, but they do work when the database scripts are run when your website starts)
Caveats:
You will not have a nice dashboard for monitoring performance of your site, reviewing logs or changing runtime settings
You will not be able to scale out your site immediately; Scaling and deployment will be your problem
Deployment configuration is your responsibility (Project -> Publish won't be available unless you configure it)
Not sure if you'll be able to use Azure Active Directory as an authentication scheme, though from the sounds of it that won't be a concern. You can write your own authentication providers: Microsoft's Zumo library only supports a handful, but the underlying Owin.Security package that Microsoft uses supports several dozen systems!
Your site will need to be publically visible to your mobile clients
Push Notifications should work, but you will be using Azure's notification hub for this.
I have no idea where ApiServices.Log will go
The easiest path to take would be to:
Create the Mobile Service in Azure to get the notification hub and settings preconfigured
Download the starter site from the dashboard
Configure the web.config as mentioned here.
It's not possible to simply configure WAMS Client library to work with your own WebApi Backend.
But WAMS library is available at github, so I'm sure you can reuse a lot of code from the WAMS project, especially if you want to use a PCL project.
To route your data securly through Azure, you could think about setting up express route. Additionally, for last weeks update, it's possible to apply a custom domain to the WAMS Backend, including your own certificate to secure your connection.
I have developed an MVC5 web application which uses Code First Migrations to build out the database. Now I am attempting to develop a mobile app (using PhoneGap if that matters) that exists as a native option to access the data of the application. However, I am having trouble finding a way for the databases to work nicely together.
Ideally, I'd like to use the same database schema entirely, and just have the application and the mobile app point to it. The database is hosted on Windows Azure. The issue I'm having is that with Azure, the standard way of handling databases with mobile apps is to use an Azure Mobile Service. However, when that service creates a database, it creates its own schema named after the service, whereas the web application uses the dbo schema. So the Users table might exist in dbo.Users for the web app, but in myAppName.Users for the Mobile Service.
I've already explored this solution, which seems to mirror my problem. However, there is an additional issue. The .NET MVC5 Authentication services use dbo as the default schema and there seems to be no way to change that.
Bottom line, if I use the default schema, the mobile app cannot access the database, but if I move the tables to the Mobile Services schema, the Login/Authentication fails because the tables don't exist in the default schema anymore.
Am I missing something here? It seems like it should be a fairly common task to have a web app and mobile app accessing the same database, but I've been investigating this for days without finding a solution.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
The standard way of using a database for mobile apps in Azure is not Azure Mobile Services. I mean, I would not call it standard but just one of the options.
When Azure Mobile Services creates a database it does not create the database with its own schema. Azure Mobile Services does not have a predefined schema. You can define your own schema. The only predefined logic is the addition of the azure mobile services tenant name as a prefix to all table names. This is done to help you host multiple azure mobile service accounts in a single database. You can override this logic if you write the app in .NET. I'm not sure if that's possible if you roll a JavaScript based Azure Mobile Services account.
My suggestion to you would be to roll your own ASP.NET Web API project and host it in Azure. You can host in Azure Web Sites or Cloud Services according to your requirements. Once you have your own APIs running in Azure you should have no problem accessing the APIs from a web site or mobile app.
Hope this helps.
I'm curious to know if this is possible, and if so, is it a good or bad idea?
We are developing an Azure application that is largely centered around worker roles that receive their work on a CloudQueue, and put the results in a CloudBlob, that the client then downloads. The web interface itself is a dead-simple ASP.NET MVC site that throws jobs in the CloudQueue, and builds URLs to download CloudBlobs.
Currently we accomplish this by having a Azure Cloud Project in our solution, which has a Web Role with the UI, and Worker Roles with the actual work.
Could we use Azure Websites to publish and host the UI, which calls back to our Worker Roles? The Azure DLLs are just regular old .NET libraries, I'm assuming Azure Websites won't have a problem with them. So, when we want to update the UI, we just publish with Visual Studio. And when we want to update the Worker Role - which is 300MB+ and has a bunch of nasty dependencies like Crystal Reports - we can build the cloud bundle and update the Cloud Service through the Azure management portal.
This seems to me like doing this would make it easier to update the UI. I think it would also be cheaper to host it, as we won't have to buy a bunch of instances for the Web Role.
If your question is "Could we use Windows Azure Websites*", based on your application architecture, you sure can use Azure Website to deploy your front end and configure all the networking connection properly so you can continue access other Azure Storage services. As you are using mostly Blob and Queue, you can continue use HTTP/HTTPS settings in the Azure websites. You can keep worker role by as it is however if it is very complex to deploy, using Windows Azure VM may be another direction to go.
I could say website deployment could be easier if your web app does not have something complex to configure in web server as websites may not be able to match web server level configuration compare to webrole and Azure VM. Answering "Easier and cheap" could be very subjective as this is all depend on load and distribution so you would have to try and evaluate it.