Okay.
Welcome to section 12 and it's finally time to publish our hard work onto the big, bad world of the
internet so that our application can be accessed from anywhere and anyone on the planet can effectively
add some fake products into their fake shopping cart and create a fake order using a fake payment card
to not be delivered their fake products.
And that's our goal of this section.
So what's coming up in this section is we're going to take a look at finalizing our react application,
creating things like a home page, and creating a production version of our react application.
Then it's going to be time to say goodbye to SQLite, and we're going to replace it with a production
worthy database server.
And the one that we're going to replace it with is SQL server as the platform that we're going to publish
our application onto is Azure a Microsoft platform and SQL server being a Microsoft database server
technology, it all makes sense that we stick with the same technology stack.
We don't have to.
We could use other database servers on Azure, but because it's Azure I'm going for SQL server.
And another reason for SQL server is that there is a free option.
You get one free SQL server database to use in Azure, and it comes with significant limitations, but
it does allow us to test our application in production with a production SQL server without incurring
any charges.
Now when it comes to deployment onto cloud platforms.
Once upon a time, there used to be three options.
There was a platform called Heroku.
Heroku still exists, but nowadays they charge a fee to use their services.
A few years ago we would be able to sign up for Heroku, just verify our email address and then deploy
our application onto Heroku with a database server and our application deployed all free of charge.
It would come with limitations about performance, etc., but it was completely free and no credit card
was necessary.
Those days have now gone thanks to crypto miners that signed up and used many free cloud provider services.
So now they're all pretty much charging.
Azure still does give us a way to do this free of charge though, so that's the reason for selecting
that platform.
The free options do come with some heavy limitations that I'll explain as we go through the deployment
process to get it onto Azure.
Something else we're going to take a look at in this section as well, is continuous integration and
continuous deployment a way of automating our deployment so that when we do commit our changes into
GitHub, then a workflow kicks off on GitHub side which is going to build our react application, build
Our.net application, and then deploy all of that updated code to Azure.
And then any of our code changes are automatically going to be deployed to our production application.
So that's what's coming up in this section.
And let's begin.