Introduction

In this day and age it’s absolutely essential to have experience with cloud-computing. The “cloud” allows us to access software and data from anywhere at any time, powered by the internet. These technologies have spread very fast amongst big companies since the mid-2000s and now they’re ubiquitous in organizations of all sizes. That means experience with cloud-computing is a requirement in the majority of programming jobs ads. The biggest player in cloud-computing is AWS (from Amazon), with 32% of market share (as of 2020), against Azure’s 20%. And it’s totally ok to choose AWS as your cloud-provider, but we’re sticking to Azure since it’s Microsoft’s solution and it integrates seamlessly with .NET’s tools.

The amount of services offered by cloud companies is enormous and ever-growing. It’s easy to get lost. The good news is that we don’t need to know too much to declare we “have experience with it”. Basically we need to be able to deploy static websites and full stack apps connected to a database and handle authentication.

In the C# Academy, the cloud area is initially split in four projects. In the first we will learn how to deploy a simple app with no database back-end, just to get familiar with Azure Dashboard and integration with VS2022. In the second, we will expand on this knowledge by adding a SQL Server, which can be slightly more complexity. And on the third we will deploy a .NET Web API along with a React front-end, a very common stack in enterprise. As a bonus, we will learn the basics of Azure Functions, “a serverless solution that allows you to write less code, maintain less infrastructure, and save on costs”. So let’s jump into it!