Full Stack Web Development

VW10 Building a Better GitHub Pages Experience Using Azure Services, How Hard Can It Be?

08/10/2022

11:00am - 12:15pm

Level: Introductory to Intermediate

Chris Klug

Developer

Active Solution

Have you ever looked at something and thought "I wonder how that works" or "I wonder how hard it would be to build that"? I think we all have! That's why we are developers… And that's exactly what I thought when I saw GitHub Pages!

Don't get me wrong! GitHub Pages is an awesome concept! Automatically generate a static website from your version-controlled markdown files, and host it in the cloud so that it is easily accessible. I love it! But it also got me thinking, "I wonder if I can't build a better version of that in no time using Azure, and maybe even add some features". So that's what I did!

In this talk, we will take a look at how easily we can build fairly complex systems using the services available to us in Azure. In this case, all I needed was a little DevOps, a container registry, some storage, a CDN, some serverless functions, a Docker container and some open source software to get it all going. And no, I didn't spend 100 hours on it! I don't have that much time to on stuff like this! And I'm sure you don't either! So let me show you how you can use Azure like a set of building blocks to create weird and wonderful things in hours instead of months! And in a lot of cases, more or less for free! And who doesn't like free stuff!?

You will learn:

  • To get an appreciation of how easy it is to build cool solutions fast by combining existing things instead of building it all from scratch
  • To get a feeling for how combining different technologies, languages and frameworks into on solution can yield big results fast
  • To see that things that can seem really complicated and hard can be built quite easily using open source frameworks and free tools