SPA Hosting on Azure / Can We Have More Boring Stuff Please

If you're looking for help with C#, .NET, Azure, Architecture, or would simply value an independent opinion then please get in touch here or over on Twitter.

Microsoft announced the long awaited SPA hosting support for Azure yesterday. Before rushing in and adopting it make sure to read the small print – there is no support for custom domain names and SSL. Which given SSL is becoming almost mandatory (and about to become super-prominent as a warning in Chrome) makes it pretty useless for public facing websites in 2018.

Its based on Azure Storage which has outstanding user voice requests from 2012 asking for SSL support with custom domains so it may also not be something that appears soon. I would love to be wrong on that.

The options for resolving it are much like they were before this feature was introduced: proxies of one form or another (CDN, Functions, CloudFlare etc.).

If you’re happy with an Azure storage based domain name, so probably working on an internal facing system I guess, it may still work for you.

As someone who does a lot of work with SPAs I must admit I’m really disappointed in this – it seems pretty ridiculous to me that in 2018 amidst all the “big” Azure announcements (machine learning on the edge, globally distributed planet scale data etc.) that hosting  a single page app, essentially static files, cheaply and easily is still awkward on the platform and requires multiple services to deliver.

I’d love to see the Azure teams really focus on, and really finish, some of the “boring stuff” like this – it might not get marketing column inches, and might not make for a snazzy new “you can do this in 5 minutes” video to impress purchasing CTOs but it would save time and effort amongst hundreds of thousands of engineers and development shops and would deliver real value to those people. I’m often reminded of the Saving Lives story that Andy Hertzfeld tells.

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GiottoPress by Enrique Chavez