Moving from local server to cloud service using Microsoft Azure

Abstract Nowadays, applications play an important role in our life. In particular, online applications are widely used through the Internet. Consequently, one of the issues that software developers are facing, is to get an application online. Application deployment is making an application available for use. In order to satisfy this purpose, a server is needed. Cloud servers are one of the solutions which have lots of advantages comparing to physical servers. In the first place, hardware or capital expenses are not required. It is a good choice for smaller businesses that are outgrowing storage very fast. In addition, storage can be added as required. Therefore, you only pay for what you need. Finally, data can be backed up in the cloud as regularly as 15-minute intervals, minimizing data losses in disaster situations. Small data set recovery time is improved. However, not all aspects of the cloud server are positive. There are also some disadvantages as well. For example, If the Internet goes down on your side or on your cloud provider’s side, you won’t have access to your information. In this thesis, we had in mind to move a project from local to the cloud using Microsoft Azure so that there would be no need for any physical server, DB, and so on, and everything would be done through web services. To this end, we had to move from local servers to service. In order to use this service, we had to upgrade the project from .Net framework to .Net core. It was needed to change the project in a way that makes it possible to use Azure. It was needed to upgrade the libraries to .NET Standard. In this way, we were able to continue using them from all our current projects, whether they target .NET Core or .NET Framework. Then we had to upgrade the projects to use frameworks that are compatible with .NET Core. Because we are using ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API, this involved migrating to ASP.NET Core. Finally, we had to upgrade the projects to use .NET Core. If there were some APIs that were unsupported, we needed to migrate to an alternative. In some cases, this was a different, newer API, which was already part of .NET Core. In other cases, we needed to use an external library that adds the missing functionality. Also, if there were some libraries that do not support .NET Core, we either needed to upgrade them, find replacements, or use them in compatibility mode. Next step was to upgrade the database from SQL to Azure SQL database. In Azure, not all functions, synonymous or other things are permitted. If our DB was using them, we had to remove and change these parts. After the upgrade process, some steps had to be done. In the first place, it was essential to create a cloud service app in .NET. Then a SQL Database in Azure had to be created. Furthermore, we had to connect a .NET Core app to SQL Database. After that, we deployed the app to Azure. Sometimes it is needed to update the data model and redeploy the app. Then it is possible to get stream diagnostic logs from Azure. Finally, we could manage the app in the Azure portal.