Why Use Azure Static Web Apps

if you're a web developer then you need to take a look at Azure static web apps enabling you to easily and seamlessly deploy your static web apps to Azure and it's packed full of amazing features I'm going to break down everything that you need to know today so tune in hey everyone I'm James and today I want to talk to you about why you should be using Azure static web apps now I'm a web developer on the side but I have many web sites that are static and I've been using Azure static web apps myself to host all of my static web apps completely for free which is awesome now if you don't know what a static website is let's start there if you're a web developer then you probably know the typical sort of web app which enables you to deploy to a server it does a bunch of processing it serves up different you know different assets back and forth a static web app is something that doesn't require that server-side rendering everything is done in the browser and all the content is served because it's all static so HTML HTML CSS JavaScript images things like that and additionally API endpoints are hosted using serverless architecture so if you sort of fit these different requirements then Azure static web apps might be for you so okay what does it mean HTML CSS JavaScript you know you can have a vanilla JS application but what if you're using different Frameworks and libraries well there's tons of them out there that are totally compatible with Azure static web apps and here's just a sampling of some things like Gatsby react angular view spelled next and next and even Blazer webassembly applications are all compatible because these enable you to have that static website where just that HTML CSS or even webassembly in the case of Blazer can be served up statically so if you're using any of these or other ones which I'll put a link to the documentation below definitely consider taking a look at Azure static web apps okay well let's talk about the key features well there's tons packed into Azure static web apps that I love and these are just a few well one there's web hosting right and actually a very very gracious free tier that I'll talk about here in a bit so you can host your static web apps for free and also a standard tier that offers a few more options as well but you have a full integrated API which I'll talk about with Azure functions it's globally distributed free SSL searching custom domain uh also built in you can integrate all providers you have staging environments and there's so much more you can think of it as sort of just if you're hosting a website you'd want the same exact features and Azure static web apps has many of them built in now I'm not going to cover all of them but I will put links into the documentation to the documentation below so you can go ahead and browse through all the features that it has now I talked about integrated apis and Azure functions the serverless compute part of azure is built in directly into Azure static web apps that means you have your static web app and an Azure function backend so you can go ahead and automatically serve up and integrate into different systems so if you're talking to databases or you're doing other things your static web app can easily talk to that Azure static web app and it's integrated in and it handles all of the course registrations and everything automatically they sit sort of side by side here and this is great because Azure functions are deployed and run only when needed now there's plenty of ways to get started there's great tutorials on the document documentation website whether using any of those different libraries or Frameworks that I talked about but additionally I would say head over to github.com forward slash static web dev this is a great resource because it has a bunch of public templates that you can use to automatically start scaffolding out your web app here for example I recently used the Blazer starter one which not only has a starter template but also has playwright tests built right in to do UI automation testing too and there's tons of them in here and they're all open source so you can take a look at them you can go ahead and create a repo based off of them or just see what's in the template so you can add that into your application now once you're ready to deploy it's super simple there's great command line Integrations that you can set up through Azure CLI or the static web app CLI or use the vs code extension as well of course you can configure things through the Azure portal now one of my favorite features of azure static web apps is this seamless continuous integration and continuous deployment that's built right in you can easily tie it to GitHub actions Azure devops or integrate into your own systems as well this means every time you change your code it'll automatically get rebuilt and then redeployed automatically to Azure static web apps I personally use GitHub actions and you can configure all of it automatically through the Azure portal as well as one of the options and it'll go ahead and create your yaml configuration files automatically which is really really cool now like I said there is a free plan and a standard plan and many of the options if not almost all of them are available in the free plan now this is a screenshot of just the the breakdown as of today of this recording when it came out so make sure you take a look at the documentation as new features are added all the time to Azure static web apps but some of the key differentials here is that while they all have web hosting obviously and CI CD integration and SSL and custom domains some of the things like the number of stage environments and app size are a little bit different and if you are looking to use something like Azure front door or you want to bring your own Azure functions you can also look at the standard plan and of course the pricing for that too all right well go get started on your journey with Azure static web apps go to azurestatic webapps.dev which is a great resource um the team is putting together all sorts of different 30 days of azure static web apps all out there for you and of course I will put links to the documentation below hope that you found this uh overview of azure static web apps uh useful and of course don't forget to join the Azure static web apps team right here on the Azure Developers YouTube as they live stream their community stand up so you can ask them your questions every single month so make sure you like subscribe and stay tuned for more Azure developer content thanks for watching

Channel: Microsoft Azure Developers

Views: 6,210

Keywords: Azure, Functions, Serverless, Computing, azure app service, azure developers, azure dev cli, azure functions

Id: Sk5i6EwPXfs

Length: 6min 23sec (383 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 01 2023