How to Deploy an Application to Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service for building, deploying, testing, and managing the services and applications by using data centers. It provides Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) to support many programming languages, frameworks, and tools, including the third-party solution software and Microsoft-specific system. It also provides cloud services range, including analytics, computing, networking, and storage. Nowadays, many businesses have concerns about application migration to the cloud. Microsoft is consistently expanding the world-wide data center network to create Azure. Read more about cloud computing and different kinds of computing services.

What can Microsoft Azure Do?

Microsoft maintains the Azure Service directories to build a virtual network and deliver the applications to the users, including virtual machines, SQL databases, Active Directory Domain Services, Application Services, Visual Studio Services, and Storage services. Users trust Microsoft Azure because of its flexibility. By using Microsoft Azure, the user can sign up for new services to make the capabilities of data storage on the fly. Microsoft also makes testing and developing applications efficiently. It can also offer discounts for migrating applications to Azure. 

Microsoft Azure is one of the best cloud service providers which uses a pay-as-you-go model for pricing that charges based on usage. Another advantage of Azure is “Disaster Recovery.” Even though Azure has native logging, a vast amount of data flowing happens to make the applications and networks overwhelming. Nowadays, learning Azure can boost your career because Azure holds 10% in the market share among other cloud service providers. It provides reliable data storage on a large scale and offers helpful tools as register metrics, and search traffic analytics. With the help of the Azure portal, we can easily monitor the document counts, analytics, index, and manage the storage capacity.   

Suggested Read:
AWS vs Azure
Cloud Computing

Services provided by Azure:

Microsoft offers more than 600 Azure services. The following are some of the services provided by Azure: 

• Mobile Services
• Data Management
• Compute Services
• Media Services
• Storage Services
• Messaging
• Machine Learning
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Machine Learning
• CDN support

Deployment of an Application to Microsoft Azure:

We will now discuss about deploying an app to Azure. When we say application, it can be a mobile application or web application. Earlier we can be called web applications as websites, but nowadays they are referred to as web applications. Coming to Windows Azure now it is renamed as Microsoft Azure. It is designed by Microsoft and is a platform of Cloud Computing.

Prerequisites for the steps:

The following are the prerequisites needed for deploying an application to Azure.

• Azure subscription
• Java Development Kit
• Command-Line Interface
• Git Client

Creating a Web app for Spring Boot:

1. Initially, open a terminal window.
2. Type  “mkdir SpringBoot” establish a local directory.
3. Then, enter the command “cd SpringBoot” in order to change in that directory.
4. Now we have to type “git clone https://github.com/microsoft/gs-spring-boot” in order to SpringBoot cloning
5. Then again type “cd gs-spring-boot/complete” change to the completed project directory.
6. Type “./mvnw clean package” by using Maven can be built JAR file.
7. After the creation of web application then type “./mvnw spring-boot:run”
8. Then test it by using “curl http://localhost:8080” and it should be from the other window terminal.
9. Finally, a welcome message will be displayed.

Azure Special Principal:

Now, we have to establish the Azure special principal. The below steps shows how to do it.

1. First, open a terminal window.
2. Then type “az login” sign into the Azure account.
3. Enter “az ad sp create-for-rbac –name “anjivelagana” –password “azure2704″” (here anjivelagana is the name & azure2704 is referred as password).
4. Now, Azure will print the following code:

{
   "appId": "cccccc",
   "displayName": "anjivelagana",
   "name": "http://anjivelagana",
   "password": "azure27004",
   "tenant": "ttttt"
}

     5. Then finally, save and close .xml file.

Building and Deploying the Application to Azure:

• You are ready to deploy the web application once the settings configuration was done. Now, let us look practically how it works.
• Type “./mvnw azure-webapp:deploy” in the terminal window to deploy the application with Maven (as already built sample project file, Maven will be used for deploying the app)
• After deploying the web app, manage it by visiting the Microsoft Azure portal.
• By clicking on the application, the Web app will be listed in the Azure Portal Service (in the overview section).
• Then, click on the link provided in the section and visit the application of Spring Boot.

Congratulations! Finally, the Spring Boot app deployed to Azure.