Explain the complete Azure life cycle in detail.
The development lifecycle of software that uses the Azure platform mainly follows two processes:
Application Development
During the application development stage the code for Azure applications is most commonly built locally on a developer’s machine. Microsoft has recently added additional services to Azure Apps named Azure Functions. They are a representation of ‘serverless’ computing and allow developers to build application code directly through the Azure portal using references to a number of different Azure services.
The application development process includes two phases: 1) Construct + Test and 2) Deploy+ Monitor.
Construct & Test
In the development and testing phase, a Windows Azure application is built in the Visual Studio IDE (2010 or above). Developers working on non-Microsoft applications who want to start using Azure services can certainly do so by using their existing development platform. Community-built libraries such as Eclipse Plugins, SDKs for Java, PHP or Ruby are available and make this possible.
Visual Studio Code is a tool that was created as a part of Microsoft efforts to better serve developers and recognize their needs for lighter and yet powerful/highly-configurable tools. This source code editor is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It comes with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js. It also has a rich ecosystem of extensions and runtimes for other languages such as C++, C#, Python, PHP and Go.
That said, Visual Studio provides developers with the best development platform to build Windows Azure applications or consume Azure services.
Visual Studio and the Azure SDK provide the ability to create and deploy project infrastructure and code to Azure directly from the IDE. A developer can define the web host, website, and database for an app and deploy them along with the code without ever leaving Visual Studio.
Microsoft also proposed a specialized Azure Resource Group deployment project template in Visual Studio that provides all the needed resources to make deployment in a single, repeatable operation. Azure Resource Group projects work with preconfigured and customized JSON templates, which contain all the information required for the resources to be deployed on Azure. In most scenarios, where multiple developers or development teams work simultaneously on the same Azure solution, configuration management is an essential part of the development lifecycle.
