Microsoft Azure Development for AWS Developers with Node.js

Course Overview
Hi everyone. My name is Jonathan Mills and welcome to my course, Microsoft Azure Development for AWS Developers with Node. js. Now I'm a consultant, and often I have to move between AWS and Azure as different clients use different tools. And over the last several years as Microsoft Azure has grown in popularity, more and more companies are migrating to Azure from AWS. So in this course, we're going to talk about how to use your existing AWS skills in the Microsoft Azure platform. Now we're going to start out just by looking at how to build out a web application, and we're going to use Node just to get the basics of an application up and running. We're going to then connect that to Cosmos DB and we'll use the Mongo API for interacting with Cosmos. We're going to set up a storage account and we're going to pull images out of a storage account to display in our application. And then I'll end with a conversation about application monitoring and how you can get some insight into some of the things that are going on inside your application. And by the end of this course, you'll have all the tools you need to get going with Azure. And I'm going to assume you already know Node. js and AWS. So I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn Azure with the Microsoft Azure Development for AWS Developers here at Pluralsight.

Getting Started
Welcome to Microsoft Azure Development for AWS Developers with Node. js. And that's a long title, but it's a long title for a reason. I'm Jon Mills and let's get into a little bit about what this course is and why this course is different than your typical Microsoft Azure course. Now we've seen it over and over again that you become accustomed to a certain set of tools, and then the company you work for changes tools or you go work for a different company and they use different tools, and you have to become accustomed to a new set of tools. And in this case, this course specifically is to help you transition to Azure from AWS. My assumption is going to be that you already know AWS. Maybe you've done some development at AWS in a previous job or your current job used to do AWS and they're moving you to Azure. I'm going to assume in some way, shape, or form you know AWS. And there's a reason for that. This course is simply going to fill in the gaps. So what that means is I'm not going to reteach you a whole bunch of stuff you already know. I'm going to assume you know the basics about cloud development and some things. And I'm going to use that knowledge from AWS just to fill in some gaps that you have. That way, this course will be shorter. You don't have to go watch a very lengthy course on Azure development because I'm going to skip all of that and I'm just going to give you the basics based upon what you may already know from AWS. And we're going to do this all under that auspices of building a Node. js web application. So I'm going to build a web app from the ground up. Then we're going to deploy it out to Azure, and we'll talk about how we deploy and that and as it relates to AWS. And I'll give you a little bit of an example of what that means in this next clip.

Building and Deploying Your First Web Application
Alright, we've gotten started, but we haven't done a whole lot yet. But in this module, we're going to build and deploy our first web application. Alright, so we've done a little bit. We've got a GitHub repo set up, we've got a starter project going, and we're going to walk down this path of helping you transition over to Azure from AWS. And so we're going to run through some of this pretty quickly, but I'm going to walk in and show you all of the different pieces and kind of how they map over to what you already know. And so we're going to start this module by getting an Azure account. You may already have one because your company has got one for you and that's why you're watching this course, but I'll kind of show you just how to get started. Then we're going to explore the Azure portal just a little bit. It's different than the AWS portal. Things are laid out a little bit differently, but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty self-explanatory. But I'll show you how everything lays out and kind of how to get started. We're going to create a web app. That's the whole point of what we're doing in this course is we're going to get started. In Azure we're going to do a web app, a containerized web app, where in AWS you may have done an EC2 instance, same basic idea. And so we'll get that thing going. And then we're going to deploy from GitHub. And we'll do a whole bunch of other stuff as we go. We'll set up some environmental variables, and we'll write some code, and we'll redeploy, and we'll do all that, but this is the basic idea of what we're going to get through in this module.

Using Databases in Azure
In this module, we're going to start using databases in Azure. Now we're walking down this path of helping you transition to Azure. And the idea here is you already have a lot of AWS experience, now I'm going to get you some Azure experience. And sometimes that's more apples to apples than others. And this one is going to be a little bit different. What we're going to do is we're going to add some book list functionality to our application. Basically, we're going to create a route that's going to add books to the database, and then we're going to create a route that's going to pull books from the database and display it to the screen. We're going to do this using MongoDB. And in general, MongoDB is fairly popular with the Node. js community because it's simple. It's easy to use. It's rapid development. And in this case, it's going to be a little different from Azure to AWS. DynamoDB has its own document store that's not Mongo, and so you have a choice in AWS. You can either implement Mongo on an EC2 instance, and there are all kinds of ways you do that, or you can use DynamoDB's document store. And that's different than Mongo. It's not quite the same thing that can make it a little bit more complicated. In Azure, we're going to use Cosmos DB. And Cosmos DB actually implements the Mongo API, and so it's going to be a little bit more straightforward for us just to wire up our application using Mongo pointing to Cosmos. So in this module, I'm going to walk through how to work through MongoDB in Cosmos DB.

Storage in Azure
Now in this module, we're going to start talking about storage options in Microsoft Azure, and how those compare back to AWS, and what you're used to. Because remember this course is all about helping you transition to Azure from AWS. And in some cases, it's very similar. In some cases, it's pretty different. In this case, it's pretty simplistic. So we're going to kind of run through this pretty quickly just to show you how everything works. Typically in AWS, S3 is the default. That's what you go to for all of your image storage needs or other types. S3 is just a bucket that you can drop whatever you want in and it has a lot of options built into it. On the Azure side, we have Blob storage. And that is going to be basically the same thing. And we're going to use that to store our images for our book covers. So in this module, we're going to set up a storage account, and I'll show you all the options and how all that stuff works, and then we're going to build our web app to list our books in a list and have the image covers associated with them as well.

Monitoring Your Application
So we're going to round out this course with a conversation about how to monitor our application. It's there. It's built. It's uploaded. It's deployed. But I want to gain some insight into what's going on inside our Node application. So this course is all about helping you transition to Azure and so I'm going to maintain that thought process as we're talking about monitoring our application. We're going to start off by talking about just monitoring our application. And if you've been doing AWS for a while, you may be familiar with tools like CloudWatch and CloudTrail, CloudTrail monitoring, API calls, and things like that. Well application monitoring in Azure is going to be fairly similar to what you've experienced over on that side. And we'll dig through, and we'll show you how to set that up, and how to see what's going on in your application that way. We're also going to talk about application insights, which is a little more similar to AWS XRay and the types of things you can monitor and pay attention to over there and just kind of see the throughput of your entire application. So we'll talk about both of these things and I'll show you how to get them set up in Azure to pay attention to what's going on inside your application.