Azure ASP.NET REST API and Database deployment

Question

We started our planning phase on a new project and we settled on a ASP.NET REST API which should be hosted on Azure. Since none of us has any experience on deployment on Azure (or any other cloud service), I have two questions.

1. Do you need separate Azure Services for the Database and the API, or might there be a combined "package" for the prototype, which later can be changed easily?
2. Is there any documentation or are there any examples of the entire deployment process of a simple dummy API and the DB? I have spent the last few hours reading the official documentation and searching around, but I would really love to see some sort of reference, just to ensure I don't miss something.

For now, the best I have found is this and this. This seems rather shallow, so I really hope, that there might be more.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65837317/azure-asp-net-rest-api-and-database-deployment

Answer 1

If you're looking for in-depth design an implementation details then I would suggest that the Azure Architecture Center would be an excellent place to start, for hands on experience there are hundreds of free courses available on Microsoft Learn.

Specifically there are sections on API design and API implementation. From the Serverless web application page is:

If you don't need all of the functionality provided by API Management, another option is to use Functions Proxies. This feature of Azure Functions lets you define a single API surface for multiple function apps, by creating routes to back-end functions. Function proxies can also perform limited transformations on the HTTP request and response. However, they don't provide the same rich policy-based capabilities of API Management.

• Function Proxies

I would suggest starting with using Azure Functions for your API (you only pay for the number of calls + a combination of CPU, memory, and runtime, but the first 1,000,000 calls per month are free (consumption plan), rather than paying for an Azure App Service to host your API and run all the time but only be utilized some of the time. Some links that might help:

• Build Serverless APIs with Azure Functions
• Customize an HTTP endpoint in Azure Functions

There is an excellent summary in this article that states:

For the heavy workloads.

• Private(enterprise) API - API Management with a Premium plan.
• Public API - Functions Proxy with the Premium plan.

For light/moderate workloads.

• Private API -Functions Proxy with the Premium plan.
• Public API -Functions Proxy with a Consumption plan and custom warm-up solution.

Then from here you can use a connection string to an Azure SQL DB inside your functions to write to the DB or something like Azure Managed Identity (yes the link is for Azure PostgreSQL but the process will be much the same for Azure SQL).

In terms of deployment you should be looking at using Azure DevOps (or GitHub Actions):

• Setting up a CI/CD pipeline for Azure functions (old way - GUI pipelines)
• Deploy an Azure Functions app to Azure (new way - YAML pipelines)
• Continuous Delivery for Azure SQL DB using Azure DevOps

Another helpful tool to get a gauge of costs is the Azure Pricing Calculator.