I’m working on a project, and I chose Azure ↗ as my cloud provider.
This series of articles attempts to explore Azure, share learning experiences, and improve my knowledge in the Azure ecosystem. I call it the ecosystem because Microsoft has built many tools in almost every tech field–Cognitive Services is my topping my favorite list.
Microsoft’s target is usually the Enterprise, but I think they have worked on some pretty slick tools you can explore yourself. If you think about it, Microsoft probably owns most of the tools you use for development – from VS Code, GitHub, and npm for a start. If you’re a .NET developer, there’s a high chance your entire stack/ tools is Microsoft’s.
For the infrastructure, I settled on the following services:
- Azure DevOps ↗
- Azure Repos (similar to GitHub)
- Azure Boards (similar to GitHub Projects)
- Azure Pipelines (similar to GitHub Actions)
- Azure Functions ↗
- App Service ↗
- Static Web Apps ↗
The most important reason I stuck with Azure for the entire stack was to reduce the indecision I would get myself into trying to pick the best tool for the job.
The second reason is all resources provisioned will be located in one place – the Azure portal. And I have credits, so why not use them. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
For the apps, here’s the stack I stuck with:
- TypeScript for both the frontend and backend
- GraphQL for the API using apollo-server – the azure functions variant –, nexus ↗ and nexus-result-field ↗
- Prisma ↗ as my database client
- Azure SQL ↗
- React
- React-Query for data fetching
Since this is just the beginning, there is no proper infrastructure setup – no automated test, preview, and release pipelines on DevOps – and no adequate development/ preview/ production environments set up either.
These are the problems I seek to learn, solve, and write.