Azure in SAFE

What is Azure?

Azure is a comprehensive set of cloud services that developers and IT professionals use to build, deploy and manage applications through a global network of data centres. Integrated tools, DevOps and a marketplace support you in efficiently building anything from simple mobile apps to Internet-scale solutions.

How does Azure integrate with SAFE?

Azure provides a number of flexible services for SAFE applications, including (but not only):

Hosting Services

Azure comes with several ready-made hosting services, including App Service, which enables seamless hosting of web applications, including ASP.NET Core applications (which Saturn is built on top of). In addition, Azure supports a number of managed hosting services for Docker and Kubernetes, which work fantastically well with SAFE.

Platform Services

Azure comes with a large number of ready-made platform services that can dramatically lower the cost of developing bespoke systems, including:

• Compute services such as Azure Functions, for hosting F# code that can dynamically scale based on load, as well as Service Fabric or Virtual Machines.
• Storage services such as Azure Storage and Data Lake, for storing virtually limitless volumes of data in unstructured or structure form.
• Database services, including managed SQL Server, MySQL and Postgres, as well as CosmosDB for document and graph stores, Redis and more.
• Messaging services including Queues, Service Bus and Event Hub.
• Analytical services such as Stream Analytics, Databricks, Machine Learning and Analysis Services.
• Security services such as Key Vault and Active Directory.

Many of the above services have ready-made SDKs that can be run on .NET and therefore from F#.