Tag: hosting

Azure Front Door in front of a static website

In the previous post, I wrote about hosting a simple static website on an Azure Storage Account. To enable a custom URL such as https://blog.baeke.info, you can add Azure CDN. If you use the Verizon Premium tier, you can configure rules such as a http to https redirect rule. This is similar to hosting static sites in an Amazon S3 bucket with Amazon CloudFront although it needs to be said that the http to https redirect is way simpler to configure there.

On Twitter, Karim Vaes reminded me of the Azure Front Door service, which is currently in preview. The tagline of the Azure Front Door service is clear: “scalable and secure entry point for fast delivery of your global applications”.

Azure Front Door Service Preview

The Front Door service is quite advanced and has features like global HTTP load balancing with instant failover, SSL offload, application acceleration and even application firewalling and DDoS protection. The price is lower that the Verizon Premium tier of Azure CDN. Please note that preview pricing is in effect at this moment.

Configuring a Front Door with the portal is very easy with the Front Door Designer. The screenshot below shows the designer for the same website as the previous post but for a different URL:

Front Door Designer

During deployment, you create a name that ends in azurefd.net (here geba.azurefd.net). Afterwards you can add a custom name like deploy.baeke.info in the above example. Similar to the Azure CDN, Front Door will give you a Digicert issued certificate if you enable HTTPS and choose Front Door managed:

Front Door managed SSL certificate

Naturally, the backend pool will refer to the https endpoint of the static website of your Azure Storage Account. I only have one such endpoint, but I could easily add another copy and start load balancing between the two.

In the routing rule, be sure you select the frontend host that matches the custom domain name you set up in the frontend hosts section:

Routing rule

It is still not as easy as in CloudFront to redirect http to https. For my needs, I can allow both http and https to Front Door and redirect in the browser:

if(window.location.href.substr(0,5) !== 'https'){
 window.location.href = window.location.href.replace('http', 'https');
}

Not as clean as I would like it but it does the job for now. I can now access https://deploy.baeke.info via Front Door!

Static site hosting on Azure Storage with a custom domain and TLS

A while ago, I blogged about webhookd. It is an application, written in Go, that can easily convert a folder structure with shell scripts into webhooks. With the help of CertMagic, I modified the application to support Let’s Encrypt certificates. The application is hosted on an Azure Linux VM that uses a managed identity to easily allow scripts that use the Azure CLI to access my Azure subscription.

I also wrote a very simple Vue.js front-end application that can call these webhooks. It’s just an index.html, a 404.html and some CSS. The web page uses Azure AD authentication to an intermediary Azure Function that acts as some sort of proxy to the webhookd server.

Since a few weeks, Azure supports hosting static sites in an Azure Storage Account. Let’s take a look at how simple it is to host your files there and attach a custom DNS name and certificate via Azure CDN.

Enable static content on Storage Account

In your Azure Storage General Purpose v2 account, simply navigate to Static website, enable the feature and type the name of your index and error document:

When you click Save, the endpoint is shown. You will also notice the $web link to the identically named container. You will need to upload your files to that container using the portal, Storage Explorer or even the Azure CLI. With the Azure CLI, you can use this command:

az storage blob upload \
     --container-name mystoragecontainer \
     --name blobName \
     --file ~/path/to/local/file

Custom domain and certificate

It’s great that I can access my site right away, but I want to use https://azdeploy.baeke.info instead of that name. To do that, create a CDN endpoint. In the storage account settings, find the Azure CDN option and create a new CDN profile and endpoint.

Important: in the settings, set the origin hostname to the primary endpoint you were given when you enabled the static website on the storage account

When the profile and endpoint is created, you can open it in the Azure Portal:

In your case, the custom domains list will still be empty at this point. You will have an new endpoint hostname (ending in azureedge.net) that gets its content from the origin hostname. You can browse to the endpoint hostname now as well.

Although the endpoint hostname is a bit better, I want to browse to this website with a custom domain name. Before we enable that, create a CNAME record in your DNS zone that maps to the endpoint hostname. In my case, in my CloudFlare DNS settings, I added a CNAME that maps azdeploy.baeke.info to gebastatic.azureedge.net. When that is finished, click + Custom Domain to add, well, your custom domain.

The only thing left to do is to add a certificate for your custom domain. Although you can add your own certificate, Azure CDN can also provide a certificate and completely automate the certificate management. Just make sure that your created the CNAME correctly and you should be good to go:

Custom certificate via Azure CDN

Above, I enabled the custom domain HTTPS feature and chose CDN Managed. Although it took a while for the certificate to be issued and copied to all points of presence (POPs), the process was flawless. The certificate is issued by Digicert:

Azure CDN certificate issued by Digicert

Some loose ends?

Great! I can now browse to https://azdeploy.baeke.info securely. Sadly, when you choose the Standard Microsoft CDN tier as the content delivery network, http to https redirection is not supported. The error when you browse to the http endpoint is definitely not pretty:

Users will probably think there is an error of some sorts. If you switch the CDN to Verizon Premium, you can create a redirection rule with the rules engine:

Premium Verizon Redirect Rule

When you add the above rule to the rules engine, it takes a few hours before it becomes active. Having to wait that long feels awkward in the age of instant gratification!

Conclusion

Being able to host your static website in Azure Storage greatly simplifies hosting both simple static websites as more advanced single page applications or SPAs. The CDN feature, including its automatic certificate management feature, adds additional flexibility.

%d bloggers like this: