Microsoft Azure Mobile platform, Windows Azure Mobile Services WAMS, or its new version, App Services, are great Cloud and MBaaS tools for building mobile backends. They use a NodeJS Restful Service Engine combined with an ORM Engine to provide a very easy-to-use platform.
Does anyone know if it is possible to use this framework outside the Azure Cloud environment, i.e. in an on-premises environment ? Is this kind of NodeJS framework open ? What is the name of this framework ?
The Azure Mobile Apps Node.js SDK to Mobile Apps is an express middleware package which makes it easy to create a backend for your mobile application.
The SDK package is still in development, but you can get all the code and documents at https://github.com/Azure/azure-mobile-apps-node
About Mobile Service in Node, there is no full code project repository, but you can glance the entire code in KUDU console site of your mobile service, the URL should look like: https://<your_mobile_service_name>.scm.azure-mobile.net/DebugConsole. The root directory is D:\home\site\wwwroot
Azure Mobile Services and/or Azure Mobile Apps are only available in Azure. There is no 'framework' that you can download and install on your own infrastructures.
Besides the Node.Js version of Mobile Services there is also an .NET version which is basically just an MVC Web API with some additional 'services' added to it (notifications, authorization, etc.)
So, you could just build an MVC Web API app and manually add the missing components by using oAuth, entity framework, etc. However, this is probably not what you are looking for :)
Hope this helps!
Edward
Kudu is the engine behind git/hg deployments, WebJobs, and various other features in Azure Web Sites. It can also run outside of Azure. It can run on premise https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu but unfortunately the rest of mobile services cannot
Related
We are currently running Azure Mobile App backend + Xamarin app as client and it works fine. Soon, we will be creating new mobile backend.
However, it would seem that, according to this
https://github.com/Azure/azure-mobile-apps-net-server/issues/227
azure mobile apps is abandoned? Even Adrian Hall has moved to AWS? This begs the question, should I create mobile backend using WebApi 2 and deploy it as usual Azure Web App, use Azure Web App Mobile App?
Namechanging from Azure Mobile Service to Azure mobile app was confusing enough,there is also complete lack of up to date documentation for Azure mobile app SDK except from couple of examples.
I'm a PM in App Center team at Microsoft. I'd like to share our continued commitment to Azure Mobile Apps as our team own it. We are doing user research right now to understand the evolving needs for these services and plan to build the next generation of Azure Mobile Apps as part of Visual Studio App Center.
While we're working on the roadmap, we are fully committed to supporting Azure Mobile Apps including support for the latest OS releases, bug fixes, and documentation updates.
This is a similar pattern to what we are doing with HockeyApp and Xamarin Test Cloud. App Center is the next generation for those services and as we roll their functionality into App Center, we are re-imagining key developer workflows and adding new features, as well as integrating them into an end-to-end CI/CD solution that helps developers ship better apps faster.
I arrived here while looking for guidance on Xamarin.Forms offline sync feature in Azure Mobile Services.
Turns out Azure Mobile Services has been superseded by Azure App Service Mobile Apps. Fine, I'll look there for offline.
Turns out Azure App Service Mobile Apps has been superseded by Visual Studio App Centre. This supports auth, data and push so I went looking for offline again.
Turns out App Center Mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) offering is being discontinued so MS can focus on DevOps.
So in short if you want mobile backend service don't bother looking for MS to provide you a stable platform as a service, instead focus on building your own on their core products and hope they don't abandon those after a couple of years.
I hope these notes help sign-post the changes and demystify things a litte.
I have reading about the new Azure offerings and trying to figure out what is what. The documentation I have been finding all over seems to have more information about the frameworks that are not valid anymore like this one here. Most of what they talk about at 4.8, 5.23, 12.13 into the video are no longer valid.
So far what I understand is that Mobile Services was offered in the past. That will soon be discontinued and App Services will take over. App Services are the top level services that contain Api Apps, Mobile Apps and Web Apps. Is this correct?
I am confused as to why we have Api Apps and Mobile Apps. Don't they do the same thing? And now that we have Web Apps in addition, are they only limited to UI related applications? The only simple thing to understand and one that has no similar other offering is the Logic app. This seems to be something that can only be done on the Azure portal. Visual Studio has no project template for it. Is there something that needs to be installed for creating logic apps in my visual studio only?
Also, in Visual Studio 2015 what is the difference between the Asp.Net Web Application project template under the WEB node and the CLOUD node? They both seem to be holding the same templates within.
Why do we have Azure Mobile App and Azure Mobile Service right under the Cloud node like here below..
..and also after selecting Asp.Net Web Application
On the face of it, both look the same. Are there any subtle differences that one needs to know about?
Also, why are all these options also not available for Asp.Net 5 templates? With all the changes happening is it a good idea to put apps developed under the latest versions to production?
Thanks for any pointers.
Azure Mobile Apps are the next version of Azure Mobile Services. Azure Mobile Services has been deprecated, and you can't provision it on new subscriptions. Mobile Apps has a lot more features over Mobile Services. To learn more, see I use Mobile Services, how does App Service help?.
Mobile Apps, Web Apps, and API Apps are all essentially the same thing, they just have some extra features for building particular solutions. You publish each of them to an App Service Plan, which is the actual underlying VM that hosts your service.
Once you've provisioned one of these app types, you can publish a Web API to it, regardless of what app type it is. For instance, you can publish your API to a Web App or Mobile App. Once you've picked a particular app type, you aren't locked in, you will just see a slightly different UI in the Azure Portal.
Mobile Apps also have a Mobile Server SDK for Node.js or .NET. The .NET server SDK is an extension of ASP.NET Web API. It doesn't yet support ASP.NET 5, mainly because there is a dependency on the OData library, which doesn't yet support ASP.NET 5. However, Mobile Apps is under active development and will support ASP.NET 5. Unfortunately, we don't have a timeline to share, mainly because not all the dependencies are complete.
For Mobile Apps in particular, you get the features of client SDKs that support authentication, offline sync, and push notifications. The easiest way to learn about the offering is to follow the quickstart guide: Create a Windows app on App Service.
You can learn all about the SDK and try them out, even without an Azure Account. Here's documentation about the .NET server SDK: Work with the .NET backend server SDK for Azure Mobile Apps.
API apps have a few extra features like creating a metadata endpoint for you automatically, which you can then use to generate client library using Visual Studio.
Currently, only Web Apps and Mobile Apps have a demo experience available at Try App Service, but you can see the API experience if you use a Microsoft Account to sign in, and then manage the app in the Azure Portal. You will see all of the API app and Mobile App options in the portal.
Note that Web and Worker roles are part of Cloud Services, and are a totally separate service. To learn about the difference between these, see Azure App Service, Virtual Machines, Service Fabric, and Cloud Services comparison.
I just describe what is the difference between Azure App Service, Mobile Apps and Api Apps, hope it helps:
Web and Mobile Apps o Mobile Apps offer a mobile application development platform with a rich set of capabilities. Based on Azure Mobile Services, Mobile Apps provide developers with a comprehensive set of client SDKs including Windows, iOS and Android as well as multi-platform environments such as Xamarin and Cordova. With Mobile Apps, you can easily send push notifications to your app, add login, and store data in the cloud with offline sync to any mobile client.
With API Apps, you can select from a rich library of existing on-premises and cloud APIs as well as contribute their own APIs easily for public or private use by Logic, Web, and Mobile apps in Azure App Service.
Azure app service, is a solution for creating web and mobile apps, is a cloud services that unifies everything you need to quickly and easily create enterprise apps that run on any platform or any device.
Azure app service is composed of: Web Apps, Logic Apps, Mobile Apps and API Apps
There is no longer API Apps in Azure, there is now only Web Apps.
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 installed VS2015 and the latest Azure SDK. I'm somewhat confused by the addition of new project templates compared to VS2013 and the previous Azure SDK. I'm trying to get my head around the new Azure App Service.
I used to create a Web API project and publish it as an Azure Cloud Service. Now, I'm offered more options:
1) Azure Cloud Service -> ASP.NET Web Role -> Web API
I'm familiar with this one.
2) Azure Cloud Service -> ASP.NET Web Role -> Azure API App
Why would anyone create an Azure API App and publish it as a cloud service?
3) ASP.NET Web Application -> Web API
4) ASP.NET Web Application -> Azure API App
These two are essentially the same as the first two without the cloud service template. However, the way they are published confuse me even more. You could publish each as a Microsoft Azure Web App or Microsoft Azure API App.
How do the following compare and contrast:
Web API -> Published as a Web App
Web API -> Published as an API APP
API App -> Published as a Web App
API App -> Published as an API APP
I agree, the tooling has confused this a little. Here is how I am dealing with it:
"Cloud Services" seem to be a thing of the past, any new project I am doing I am going with AppService and scripting the set-up of that app service with an ARM (Azure Resource Manager) template. You will find a template for this under Cloud->Azure Resource Group in VS 2015. This is entirely optional, but is a great best practise.
As you point out above, all 4 combinations are valid. In fact an Azure API App uses the same technology under the surface as the website does (it is a little buried away in the portal, but you can navigate down from the API app to the underlying website by opening the API App in the preview portal, and under the label for "API App Host" double click).
Using the API App template in VS2015 you will just get a standard asp.net website like you do with the web app templates, but the main difference is that the API App is slimmed down by default unlike the website template that will have lots of libraries that are of no use to an API app (no jquery, bootstrap RazorViews etc). The smaller footprint should mean that there is less to load when asp.net starts-up, hence faster start-up times.
API apps have easy integration points for use in Logic Apps (think a workflow from Salesforce defined in the Logic app that requires to call your API to update data to your database). You could do this with a web app, but there will be more plumbing to do.
I believe the plan in the near future is a marketplace of API apps (app store style) that will allow us devs to sell APIs.
Swagger out the box. The API app template has Swashbuckle pre-installed for generating the Swagger documentation for you API (arguably you could just install this via nuget into your web app template).
On the whole API apps have the exact same functionality as web apps, but slimmed down with extra bits in places.
is there any way to publish my API in azure mobile service API instead of using its own. I want just to know it, because assume I have a backup server in amazon and as you know I don't have access to azure sdk in there and it means technically I cant use the API anywhere outside the azure.
Azure mobile services is actually based on the .Net web api in their C# flavor and on node.js on the Javascript side. You could surely write an API using those technology and have the same behavior. You will gain the fact of being more portable, however you will lose some of the preconfigured stuff from Mobile services.
If you are using .NET, please check this to see how to build a Web api! http://www.asp.net/web-api.
If you are using Javascript, here is where you should start : https://nodejs.org/
Both tech are quite easy to learn and super powerfull, have fun! When your API is built, you could just publish them as an azure Web APP (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/web/) or an Azure API (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/api/) instead of the mobile App
Hope it helps, if you have more questions, please ask!
You can create and publish your own custom APIs in azure mobile service. You could even access in via azure mobile service sdk in client by using "InvokeApiAsync<>()" method.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/dn614130.aspx
If you want to access the api via fidder/httpclient than AZM SDK, pass the mobile service key in HTTP header as Name:'x-zumo-application' value:'application key from portal'