COMEM+ Architecture & Deployment course

In this course you will learn:

How to deploy applications on a Linux server on an IaaS platform (Microsoft Azure).
How to deploy applications on a PaaS platform (Render).

In pursuit of this goal, you will learn:

How to use the command line and version control.
The basics of Unix system administration and cloud computing architectures.
Good security practices related to system administration and web applications.

This course is a COMEM+ web development course taught at HEIG-VD.

:collision: Exam
Legend
What you will need
Plan
How to improve our basic deployment
More Practice
Extra
Frequently Asked Questions
References

:collision: Exam

Your exam will take place on Thursday February 8th at 13:15. No material but pen and paper will be allowed for this exam. We have prepared a document highlighting all the things you must know to succeed.

Legend

Parts of this guide are annotated with the following icons:

:book: Slides or written documents pertaining to the various topics discussed during this course.
:hammer: An exercise aimed at practicing a topic discussed in class.
:collision: This exercise is graded.
:key: Solution(s) for an exercise.
:movie_camera: A video related to a subject.
:classical_building: The deployment architecture put in place during an exercise.

For you to succeed in this course, it is highly recommended that you read and complete all the content that is not labeled "extra".

What you will need

A Unix CLI
- Linux/macOS users can use their standard Terminal
- Windows users should install Git for Windows which includes Git Bash
Git
- macOS users should install the command-line tools
- Windows users should install Git for Windows
A free GitHub account
Google Chrome (recommended, any browser with developer tools will do)
A free Render account

Plan

How to improve our basic deployment

The basic SFTP deployment of the PHP TodoList has several flaws which we will fix during the rest of the course:

Transfering files manually through SFTP is slow and error-prone. We will use Git to reliably transfer files from our central codebase and easily keep our deployment up-to-date over time.
Hardcoding configuration is a bad practice. We will use environment variables so that our application can be dynamically configured and deployed in any environment without changing its source code.
Starting our application manually is not suitable for a production deployment. We will use a process manager to manage the lifecycle of our application: starting it automatically when the server boots, and restarting it automatically if it crashes.
Accessing a web application through an IP address is not user-friendly. We will obtain a domain and configure its DNS zone file so that our application is accessible with a human-readable domain name.
Using a non-standard port is not user-friendly either. We will run the application on port 80 or 443 so that the end user does not have to specify a port in the browser's address bar.
Not discussed yet
Our application is not secure as indicated by the browser, because it is served over HTTP and not HTTPS. We will obtain a TLS/SSL certificate signed by a trusted certificate authority so that our application can be served over HTTPS and recognized as secure by browsers.
Not discussed yet

More Practice

:hammer: Configure nginx as a load balancer

Complete deployments

Extra

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the meaning of life?

References

These are the main references used throughout this course. More detailed and additional links to various online articles and documentation can be found at the end of each subject.

Wikipedia is also often referenced, namely these and related articles: