I build a web based mobile app (using react), which I'm hosting as an Azure Web app. This website is connected to a node server, which I'm hosting using a azure virtual machine (I don't know if this is the best approach, maybe I should host this as a webapp instead of VM ?).
I'm still new to this strategie of developing a web based mobile app and connecting it to a hosted backend in the cloud so I apologize if this is a trivial question.
I'm using websockets to connect my frontend to the node server and then I consume messages. I don't have a database it is a simple application.
The steps I'm doing to run the app are:
I connect to the Azure VM from my laptop with ssh
run my server using node server.js
When the server is runing, I can refresh my website and everything works fine
Now, the problem is that I want the node server to run all the time. However, I noticed that the server stops running when I deconnect (ssh) my laptop from the virtual machine. So I find myself doing these steps (connecting to the VM with ssh and running the server manually) each time I want to use the app.
Is there a way to do this so that the node server runs all the time without stoping? Also since I'm new to this, is this the right way to deploy frontend and backend? I assume I can't deploy both frontend and backend in the same Azure webapp or am I wrong?
(Since part of your question is around "Is there a better way?", I would answer that instead of fixing the issue in your current VM hosting :)).
To take full advantage of cloud for your applications, PaaS is always preferred over IaaS. In this case, unless you have any specific reason, you should deploy your backend Node app in another App Service (aka Web App). Or you can consider Azure Function also if your node app has a small set of APIs, but it will require code update. Both support multiple platforms including node.js. Since you mentioned you are leveraging Web App for your react mobile app, so I hope you are already bit familiar with it. Also since Azure Function would require code change, so Web App is preferred this case.
Note: I omitted other solutions like AKS, Service Fabric etc. for now, since currently we are talking about the problem of deploying only a single app, for which those will be overkill at this moment.
Also, to your point
I assume I can't deploy both frontend and backend in the same Azure webapp or am I wrong?
Yes technically you can, depending on your scenario by "bundling" into a single app if both are in same platform (like Node in this case). Though whether one should do that would be an opinionated answer. But even if you keep those separate, you can still leverage single App Service Plan for cost saving. So keeping separate like you have now is what I would suggest to maintain "separation of concern".
Related
According to that answer hosting that allows deploy NodeJS apps
will generally give you (at a minimum) shell access (via SSH) which
you can use to run the Node.JS application
But is it possible to deploy NodeJS application without access to ssh? On my hosting plan, I have only FTP access and I was wandering if I can do that or should I change hosting provider?
If your app is fully static you can build it into static js files (i.e. npm run build in vue.js) and then it should work on ftp hosting. Note, however, that in this case if your usage is low you can use something like Google App Engine or Netlify and essentially get free hosting for your static app.
However, if your app involves some back-end operations, i.e. express.js then you need to be able to run node.js server itself and you need a VPS-based or container-based hosting.
Feel free to reach out to me via discord here and ask more questions - https://discord.gg/UTxjBf9juQ.
I am making my first mobile app using Xamarin.Forms and FreshMVVM as the architecture and I want this app to get info off my SQL database (which is located in azure) by calling an API Rest. I already know how to develop an Api, and all the SQL and Azure related stuff, as well as how to get info from my API.
But what I don't know is how to access this API when the project in which is created is not executed, in other words, I don't know how to make my API Rest accessible all the time, so the App can access to it whenever is needed.
How do you do this?
Thank you all for your time, hope you have a good day.
You need to publish the API to a web host. Azure App Services. AWS. Digital Ocean VM running a web server. Possibly GoDaddy, though I have never used them. Your own server.
I am new to nodejs. I've created a simple webservice and it works on local but by using node app/nodemon app. Well I want to publish it internet and deploy my service in our server. (We do not want to use external servers/services such as heroku, azure etc.)
As I searched, peopel mostly deployed those services. So what is the best way to deploy a WS with nodejs in your own server?
I have a windows server for now but would like to use may be in linux platform later.
i have a web app that has a seperate nodejs backend and angular frontend.
is it possible to make them both run on the same azure web service? or do i need a stand alone service for each?
my nodejs server is just a light API that feeds my angular app with some statistical data to render it. if it is possible what would be the way to do it?
since i am using typescript i know i need to push my nodejs using zipdeployment and i know i need to use visual studio to push my angular project to azure. but when i want to run both on the same service, how do i do it?
is it possible to make them both run on the same azure web service? or do i need a stand alone service for each?
If you choose the Web App on Windows OS, IIS allows you to configure multiple virtual applications within a single website. For this approach, you could follow Deploying multiple virtual directories to a single Azure Website. Note: The multiple virtual applications would share the same application pool.
As kim mentioned, you pay for the App Service Plan, not for the Web App. You could also host nodejs backend and angular frontend in different web apps under the same app service plan.
For the deployment, you could leverage VS publish wizard or manually upload your files via KUDU or FTP. Moreover, you could also follow Deploy the app section about various approaches for deployment.
You can run multiple web sites in different web apps in Azure so that they are sharing the same Azure App Service.
You can think of the App Service as a virtual machine offering resources for your applications. How many web apps you can run simultaneously depends on the size of your plan, see this page for details.
This way you can deploy them separately, manually or automatically using e.g. VSTS.
I am new to Microsoft windows azure cloud and want to run my game server using node.js in azure cloud. I read the windows azure Node.js Developer Center site and it seems my server can run in azure cloud multiple ways.
Which azure option is good for my TCP game server using node.js?
Three options:
Web Site
Cloud Service
Virtual Machine
Web Sites are essentially shared web hosting, which only supports HTTP, so not an option for you.
Cloud Services are probably what you want. This is the core PaaS offering on Windows Azure. It will let you run pretty much whatever you want, as long as it runs on Windows. It supports TCP endpoints. There's are pretty nice tools for Node.js. There are two flavors of running Node in a Cloud Service: a web role or a worker role. Web roles use IIS and run Node.js behind it. That won't work for your raw TCP connections, so you'll want to use a worker role. A worker role will simply launch your Node app and leave it running forever.
Virtual Machines would work fine too, but they don't provide much value compared to Cloud Services. In a cloud service, you can spin up new VMs on demand, a load balancer sits in front of your app distributing traffic, your app will get restarted if it ever crashes, you can have your VM automatically patched without downtime, etc. Unless you can't run in a cloud service for some reason, you rarely want to use a raw VM.
tl;dr You want a worker role in a cloud service. :-)
Windows Azure does have a toolkit for Social Games on Github, this might help you in you in your endeavours, not sure it supports Node.js mind you, there should be some takeaways to help you.
https://github.com/WindowsAzure-Toolkits/wa-toolkit-games
This blog post gives a good breakdown on where to run what and use cases for each.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/silverlining/archive/2012/06/27/windows-azure-websites-web-roles-and-vms-when-to-use-which.aspx
It really depends on your application, what backend does it have, number of users, performance, latency etc...
A word of warning though, running Node.js on Windows is mostly fine but there are several libraries that will not work. Don't know if it's a hard requirement that you use Azure but there are other Node hosting solutions out there.
Nodejitsu
Nodester
Those are only two, there are more out there.
Disclaimer: I'm building a Node.js hosting solution, modulus.io.