The blog post details the process of deploying the app to Microsoft Azure. The process involves encapsulating the application within a Docker container, creating a Docker image of the application, and using Visual Studio tools for developing with Docker containers. The application is then deployed using Azure App Service, a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web applications. The post also discusses creating an Azure Container Registry for the Docker image and setting up the API for the application.
Setting up a development environment and integrating real-time stock data into an application is just the beginning of our journey in creating a robust stock exchange system. The next critical step is deploying our application to a reliable and scalable platform. In this blog post, we're going to walk through the process of deploying our app to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Azure offers a variety of services to host, scale, and manage our application.
In this process, we will first containerize our application, which involves packaging our application along with its dependencies into a Docker container. This ensures our application can run consistently in any environment. Once our application is containerized, we will then push the Docker image of our application to the Azure Container Registry. This is a private registry where we can manage our Docker images securely. Finally, Azure App Service will pull this Docker image from the Azure Container Registry and create a usable instance of our application in the cloud, making it accessible for use.
Before uploading our application to Azure, we need to first containerize it. Containerization involves packaging our application along with its dependencies into a container using Docker. This will ensure that our application runs seamlessly in any environment, eliminating the "it works on my machine" problem. In this process, we will encapsulate our application within a Docker container and create a Docker image of our application. This image will include everything needed to run the application - the code, runtime, system tools, libraries, and settings. After the Docker image of our application is created, it can be pushed to the Azure Container Registry. From there, Azure can pull this image and run our application in an isolated environment, ensuring consistency in deployment and scalability.
Docker is a platform that uses OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. The tools included in Visual Studio for developing with Docker containers are easy to use, and greatly simplify building, debugging, and deployment for containerized applications. You can work with a container for a single project, or use container orchestration with Docker Compose or Service Fabric to work with multiple services in containers.
Visual Studio Container Tools & Docker on Windows - Visual Studio (Windows) | Microsoft Learn
Docker support is available for ASP.NET projects, ASP.NET Core projects, and .NET Core and .NET Framework console projects.
The support for Docker in Visual Studio has changed over a number of releases in response to customer needs. There are two levels of Docker support you can add to a project, and the supported options vary by the type of project and the version of Visual Studio. With some supported project types, if you just want a container for a single project, without using orchestration, you can do that by adding Docker support. The next level is container orchestration support, which adds appropriate support files for the particular orchestrator you choose.
In Visual Studio 2022, the Containers window is available, which lets you view running containers, browse available images, view environment variables, logs, and port mappings, inspect the filesystem, attach a debugger, or open a terminal window inside the container environment. See Use the Containers window.
Adding Docker support
You can add Docker support to an existing project by selecting Add > Docker Support in Solution Explorer. The Add > Docker Support and Add > Container Orchestrator Support commands are located on the right-click menu (or context menu) of the project node for an ASP.NET Core project in Solution Explorer. Select Linux as the target OS.
After you add Docker support to your project in Visual Studio, the following changes are made: