how to host a serverless static website on azure

For my little gfpg project I wanted to put a simple static website online without having to set up and maintain a web server. I read about going serverless with a static site using S3 on AWS, but I wanted to try that on Azure instead. BLOB storage seemed the obvious alternative to S3, but it took some searching around and finding the right documentation on MSDN to get it all up and running.

If you’re on a similar quest to publish some static content to Azure BLOB storage as a serverless website, this short guide will help you along.

1. First of all we need to create an Azure BLOB storage account for the site. The most important part is to choose a general-purpose v2 Standard storage account, for the account kind. This is the only type that supports hosting a static website. Guess who didn’t do that.
2. Next thing is to enable static hosting of your files. This will create a $web folder in your storage account, which will be the root folder of your website. It’s that simple.
3. Copy your files into the $web folder using the Storage explorer blade in the Storage account menu, or the Storage explorer app. You can already test your site using the Azure endpoint.

You can stop here if this is a personal project and you don’t need HTTPS support or a custom domain. In my case, I did want to go all the way, so here’s how to get that working as well.

1. Get a domain name. Make it sassy ;). Make sure your domain registrar allows you to edit the CNAME records for your domain. This is pretty standard, but not all cheap web hosters allow this and you need it later on to hook up your domain to Azure.
2. Set up an Azure CDN endpoint for your static site. I picked the Microsoft CDN option which is the most basic one, so you don’t need any accounts with a third party CDN provider.
3. Now you can map your custom domain to your Azure CDN endpoint using a CNAME record.
4. Create an HTTPS certificate for your site on Azure with just a few clicks. I was afraid this was going to be hard but it’s so damn easy it’s beautiful. There really is no excuse anymore to let your site just sit there on HTTP these days.
5. Last thing to do is set up some caching rules for the CDN. We don’t want to be hitting the “slow” BLOB storage all the time and use the faster CDN instead. Depending on the option you chose for the CDN this will differ, but if you picked the Microsoft one you have to use the Standard rules engine to set your caching rules. If you picked Akamai or Verizon, you can use CDN caching rules instead.
   For a simple setup on the Microsoft CDN, go to the CDN settings Rules engine page, and set a global cache expiration rule to override and an expiration you like.
   After a few minutes you’ll see the cache header appear in your HTTP requests.
6. Here you can also create a rule to redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS, so people don’t accidentally hit the insecure version.

One more tip on the CDN. You can also purge the CDN cache after you pushed an update to your site to apply the changes, before your CDN cache expires. This is handy if you’ve set a rather big expiration time, because you don’t expect the site to change very often.