Azure Static Web Apps
At Build 2020, Microsoft announced the preview of a new service Azure Static Web Apps as a lighweight web site hosting framework for less dynamic websites. The main promise is that as long as the website content does not need to change that frequently, ie. it is not data driven, then the content can be served as static content and doesn’t require a sophisticated web server nor configuration.
In some way this sounds like a step backwards, to a time when individual web pages were hand-crafted and a consistent look and feel was only produced by consistent work from the web developers. Where this changes is if you make use of static web site generators to prepare the content before it is made available for consumption. By doing the preparation offline from the webserver you can radically reduce the hardware requirements and thereby offer a capable hosting service at a fraction of the normal costs.
We have been experimenting with this service, using Hugo to do the site generation and Github for managing the changes and the deployment pipeline and have had very encouraging results. It requires a mindset change but the chances are that this will signficantly reduce our hosting costs and at the same time increase the flexibility of our layout models.
We’ll keep you posted as to how we get on with further updates to this post.
Key references
The following sites are particularly useful in working through the set up of a static web site deployed to Microsoft Azure:
- HUGO - The world’s fastest framework for building websites
- Tutorial: Publish a Hugo site to Azure Static Web Apps Preview
- Setup a custom domain in Azure Static Web Apps Preview
- How to configure a root domain in an Azure Static Web App
- Github Actions for Hugo
- Workflow for autoprefixer and postcss-cli
- Docsy - A Hugo theme for creating great technical documentation sites