Launching a Site in Azure

So I built a property management website on my Memorial Day vacation time while I had downtime. It's a real simple UI scroller with a video, information sections, contact information, login that isn't connected to the .NET side yet. I worked in Claude's favorite language TypeScript with React and Tailwind.

I had a lot of fun deploying it and learning about Azure. I got my AZ900 certification and I'm halfway done studying for the Admin AZ104. So I figured managing a site will help. Cloud technology along with DevOps knowledge is close to nonexistent for me, so it was time to learn.

It took an evening up, not an hour or so like I thought. I didn't have Azure CLI setup so I literally had to start with installing that. A lot of things went well, some didn't go well, but I had a great time. And the site's live albeit in an extremely simple manner.

ACR was the highlight. Azure Container Registry lets you build and push your container image without Docker Desktop even installed on your machine. One command — az acr build — and it builds in the cloud and stores the image. I was genuinely impressed by how clean that workflow is.

The Dockerfile itself came together fast. Multi-stage build: Node builds the React app, then nginx serves it. SPA routing, asset caching, all baked in. Nothing clever, just solid.

App Service was straightforward too. B1 Linux plan, Web App for Containers, point it at the ACR image. Cheap and simple. Managed SSL certificate just worked — no cert wrangling, no renewals to think about.

Azure CLI and the Portal UI were both great for troubleshooting. When something wasn't working I could bounce between the command line and the portal to figure out what was going on. And the projected cost was reasonable — no sticker shock, no hidden charges waiting to surprise me.

Even the Mac setup went smooth. First time installing Homebrew, first time running Azure CLI outside of a work machine. No issues.

And the timeline — I had this on my roadmap for mid-June. Shipped three weeks early because I had a free evening and momentum. Sometimes the best project management is just starting.

The quotas in Azure killed my tempo that evening. I still don’t fully understand the why or what. Brand new Azure subscriptions have zero compute quota, apparently. I got denied on several requests with poor error messaging. It told me I had no more Regional vCPU quota left, but it meant App Service Plan Quota left. It took like almost an hour and tons of requests and finally I could run a single linux SKU. I feel like the Azure Quota UX is bad or I’m just really ignorant but this wasted time.

DNS and email. I pointed my domain correctly, and it didn’t take too long for me to read up and create most of the records I think. Email was a bit different, and the support email I have is running out of another domain. I have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records but the SPF propagation timing meant things went straight to junk to begin with for three different addresses. But, then I found out that if the sending envelope domain doesn’t match the alias it gets flagged anyway to have a high spam score. Whatever. There’s nobody that will need to reply to this address yet, so I’ll deal with that later. It was an interesting learning experience though.

Cost monitoring and alerts. Health checks. HTTPS redirects. Four different security things that a LLM told me I need. No uptime monitoring. I can also let Cloudflare proxy for me. I have no container vulnerability scanning. No Terraform, no infrastructure as code. No CI/CD. I deploying with az acr build from my terminal. No source control other than local. If my Macbook dies, the code does too.

None of this matters for a simple marketing site with no users or backend yet. But I want to get practice and learn more and eventually it would be great to see the site serve real users. Deployed is not exactly the same thing as production-ready, and it’s a learning experience for me.

I had this on my todo list for a while so I’m glad I got it done. The site is live at shermanhomesllc.com and it’s simple and missing a ton. But it’s mine, and I learned a lot about Azure, setting up various things and playing in the UI for another hour on the top of what I had to do. I got a good list of things to learn about and get done in the future. It will help me through my next certification too - and honestly I feel like it will give me a more realistic playground for future studies. I tell my direct reports on my team to study and have side projects, so it’s good to be a role model and constantly be in learning mode. Sometimes the best way to learn tech is to just ship something.