Building powerful salable websites using the cloud

By | July 17, 2018
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Understanding the power of cloud architecture

Introduction

The world has moved forward so much, in the last several years and new technologies keep coming that makes development easier and faster. Cloud technology is one such aspect, that has revolutionized the way developers and testers could think of the software development cycle. Yes, now you might, ask, what is there in for you and me ? That is, Justin and Ambika. Good question. Whatever technology is out there, until it of use to us, it does not impact our life, right ? So let’s see how cthe loud model brings drastic changes in the way software is developed and consumed by users.

To understand this, let’s find out how software for the web was developed previously and how users were able to access those websites

Traditional website development

  1. In traditional web development, using C# and ASP.net platform, we create a website, on our local system
  2. We create a database, ( again locally, meaning in our laptop or desktop ) and make sure everything is fine
  3. Then we create configuration files, which will configure various aspects of our website, like database connectivity ( username, password and so on ) etc
  4. We go to a site like bigrock or bigdaddy and buy space – like for example 500 MB of server space
  5. Once we have our account, we make sure that the software that they use ( server hosting people ) match with the software we have in our system. If not, it won’t work
  6. We create a folder on the server and upload our files ONE BY ONE, making sure we won’t miss anything
  7. Then we put the URL, in the browser and check if our website is accessible for everyone.
  8. Now here is the critical part, if everything works, you are happy. But if not, you are in for BIG TROUBLE! Because you have no idea, how their server is configured, what additional software they might have installed and how those software are configured ( This was the issue I was facing, two days back, when ASP.NET core was not working on the old ASP.NET servers)
  9. Even if everything is fine, let’s assume, your business flourishes and you want more server space, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING CAN BE DONE. You have delete your existing account ( lose the money you paid initially) buy a new server account, download the files to your computer, upload it back to the server and hope everything is fine. And this has to be done in such a way, your business is not impacted. Moreover, if the business is lower, after a few months, you would still continue to pay a premium amount, based on the server space you requested earlier

Now let’s look at our things change cloud based development

Could based Web application development

  1. Create a web application ( not a website – note the difference ) on your local system, using Visual Studio 2017
  2. Create a free Microsoft Azure account ( takes about 5 minutes )
  3. Right click on your project in Visual Studio and choose ‘Publish to Azure‘ . Done !. Your website would be accessible for everyone in less than 30 seconds

For example, I published this application –> http://jj2020test.azurewebsites.net using azure cloud, yesterday night.

Now you might ask, what about scalability, what if we need more storage, more processing power? No problem, just log on to azure , go to the resources section, and increase the number of hard disk or processors, that you require. In less than a few minutes, your website will have additional storage and additional processing power. Later if you decided to lower it, go ahead and lower that. It’s as easy as that.

This would be a BIG boon for small business who may not have the expertise or requirement for all year around resources. For example, if you take the example of IRCTC website ( train booking site ), the most load happens during the morning. We could schedule azure to scale up ( increase resources ) during the day and scale down ( decrease usage of resources ) during the night. You would be charged only for what you use. Also, you could ask azure to replicate a copy of your web application in different continents so that users would be able to access them much faster. There are still more features, which makes software development life cycle using azure, or similar technologies ( aws, google cloud etc ) much more enticing

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