The TechConf website allows attendees to register for an upcoming conference. Administrators can also view the list of attendees and notify all attendees via a personalized email message.
The application is currently working but the following pain points have triggered the need for migration to Azure:
- The web application is not scalable to handle user load at peak
- When the admin sends out notifications, it's currently taking a long time because it's looping through all attendees, resulting in some HTTP timeout exceptions
- The current architecture is not cost-effective
In this project, you are tasked to do the following:
- Migrate and deploy the pre-existing web app to an Azure App Service
- Migrate a PostgreSQL database backup to an Azure Postgres database instance
- Refactor the notification logic to an Azure Function via a service bus queue message
You will need to install the following locally:
- Create a Resource group
- Create an Azure Postgres Database single server
- Add a new database
techconfdb
- Allow all IPs to connect to database server
- Restore the database with the backup located in the data folder
- Add a new database
- Create a Service Bus resource with a
notificationqueue
that will be used to communicate between the web and the function- Open the web folder and update the following in the
config.py
filePOSTGRES_URL
POSTGRES_USER
POSTGRES_PW
POSTGRES_DB
SERVICE_BUS_CONNECTION_STRING
- Open the web folder and update the following in the
- Create App Service plan
- Create a storage account
- Deploy the web app
-
Create an Azure Function in the
function
folder that is triggered by the service bus queue created in Part 1.Note: Skeleton code has been provided in the README file located in the
function
folder. You will need to copy/paste this code into the__init.py__
file in thefunction
folder.- The Azure Function should do the following:
- Process the message which is the
notification_id
- Query the database using
psycopg2
library for the given notification to retrieve the subject and message - Query the database to retrieve a list of attendees (email and first name)
- Loop through each attendee and send a personalized subject message
- After the notification, update the notification status with the total number of attendees notified
- Process the message which is the
- The Azure Function should do the following:
-
Publish the Azure Function
- Refactor the post logic in
web/app/routes.py -> notification()
using servicebusqueue_client
:- The notification method on POST should save the notification object and queue the notification id for the function to pick it up
- Re-deploy the web app to publish changes
Complete a month cost analysis of each Azure resource to give an estimate total cost using the table below:
Azure Resource | Service Tier | Monthly Cost | Detail |
---|---|---|---|
Azure Postgres Database | Basic (1 vCore, 50GB) | $30.3 | |
Azure Service Bus | Basic | $0.05 | per million operations |
Azure App Service | Free (1 App, 1GB) | $0 | for 1 app, |
Azure Functions | Consumption Plan | $0 | for first 1 million execution |
$0.2 | per million executions | ||
$0 | for first 400,000GB-s | ||
$0.000016 | per GB-s | ||
Azure Storage Account | Block Blobs | $0.00081 | per GB |
The architecture for this application uses several Azure cloud solutions. The web app is a simple application that has no unique setup needs. This allows us to move away hosting it on a bare-metal server or virtual machine. We can use Azure's App service to host the web app.
The application does send email and if there are a lot of emails to send, this can be a long process. We could include this directly in our web app, but it may slow down its performance in peak use periods. We can move this functionality to an Azure Function. Azure Functions provide an endpooint where we can run code in response to an event. Offloading the email notification feature will speed up app's performance.