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Background In many industries it necessary for a company to store and log documentation submitted from customers for example insurance claims often require documentation associated with a claim.   Other industries with similar requirements include Healthcare and Mortgage/Banking.     The document storage microservice presented here leverages several Azure platform technologies, Azure App Services and Azure Container Register, Azure Storage for document storage,   and Azure SQL for structured data storage.   Code for the service can be found here .  System Architecture The diagram below shows the major components of the service.   The microservice utilizes several design patterns in order to facilitate code maintainability and reuse.  The repository pattern is used to form the backbone of our data persistence layer.    The factory pattern is used in the microservice to further decouple the data layer model from the bus...

Introduction Azure function capabilities are fast evolving.   They have come a long way from their inception just a few years ago.    Originally conceived to be small functions with short execution.   There were no modern architecture capabilities like dependency injection. The functions were also originally limited in the number of parallel instances that were allowed.      From these somewhat humble beginnings Azure functions have quickly matured as a platform.   Today it is possible to run long running methods using durable functions.   Additionally, we now have support for dependency injection using an extension library. Azure Functions are event driven, that is they do not run continuously, but are called in response to an event such as a http request, timer, or an update to a blob storage account.    The function is triggered executes and is then shut down.   The billing for Azure Functions is based on consumption...

For our new ecommerce site we need to create a authentication mechanism.   Since we have a cloud native application we are going to leverage third party authentication to validate our users.   The .Net core framework supports several third party authentication mechanisms out of the box.   Third parties that are supported include google, Facebook and twitter.   These third party libraries utilize industry standard oAuth   to provide authentication.    Using a third party authentication has two main advantages.   First your users can authenticate using an existing login.   This makes it more convenient for the end user.   Secondly,   it offloads the management of logins and passwords to a third party,   thereby reducing the amount of resources that the organization has to spend on end user security.      The code for our web site is located on git here .    For simplicity we will utilize Facebook ...

Web App                                                                                                                                                           Web apps are Microsoft cutting edge PAAS offering.   Azure web apps abstracts the   management of hardware and operating system.   It allows developers to focus on the high value activities – delivering working solutions that solve business problems. How we got here (briefly) Our journey to   fully managed development environment began with virtualization.   VMs allowed us to host several instances on the sam...