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JSJ BONUS: Web Apps on Linux with Jeremy Likness and Michael Crump

In this episode Aimee Knight and Charles Max Wood discuss Microsoft's Web Apps on Linux offering with Jeremy Likness and Michael Crump.

[00:37] Michael Crump Introduction

Michael is on the developer experience team for Azure.

[00:52] Jeremy Likness Introduction

Jeremy is on the cloud developer advocacy team. Their mission is to remove friction and support developers and work with teams to build a positive experience.

The NodeJS team is headed up by John Papa. They have teams around the world and involved in many open source communities.

They're focused on building documentation and creating great experiences

[02:54] What is it about Azure that people should be getting excited about?

Azure is a huge platform. It can be overwhelming. They're trying to help you start with your problem and then see the solution as it exists on Azure.

Azure is growing to embrace the needs of developers as they solve these problems.

The experience is intended to be open and easy to use for any developer in any language on any platform. It allows you to work in whatever environment you want.

Standing up applications in production is tough. Azure provides services and facilities (and interfaces) that make it easy to manage infrastructure.

You don't have to be an operations expert.

Chuck mentions this messaging as he heard it at Microsoft Connect() last year.

It's not about bringing you to .NET. It's about making it easy where you're at.

Aimee adds that as a new-ish person in the community and Azure excites her because the portal and tutorials are easy to follow for many new programmers.

A lot of these features are available across command lines, tools, and much more.

The documentation is great. See our interview with Dan Fernandez on the Microsoft Docs.

[12:04] Web Apps on Linux

Web application as a service offering from Microsoft. I don't need to worry about the platform, just what's different about my application.

Web Apps has traditionally been on Windows. Web Apps on Linux is in preview.

You can choose the size of your infrastructure. You only get billed for what you use and can scale up.

Setting up multiple servers, managing synchronization and load balancing is a pain. Web Apps gives you a clean interface that makes this management easy.

You can also scale across multiple datacenters around the world.

[15:06] Why Linux? What's hard about Windows?

Node was originally created on Linux and many tools run nicely on Linux. It was later ported to Windows.

The toolchains and IDE's and build processes is in an ecosystem that is targeted more toward Linux than Windows.

This allows people to work in an environment that operates how they expect instead of trying to map to an underlying Windows kernel.

Aimee gives the example of trying to set up ImageMagick on Windows.

Web Apps on Linux also allows you to build integrations with your tools that let you build, test, and deploy your application automatically.

[19:12] Supported Runtimes

Web Apps on Linux supports Node, PHP, Ruby, and .NET Core.

You can run a docker container with Node up to 6.x. If you want Node 7.x and 8.x you can create your own Docker container.

Web Apps on Linux is build on Docker.

The containers also have SSH, so developers can log into the docker container and troubleshoot problems on the container.

If you can build a container, you can also run it on this service.

At certain levels, there's automatic scaling.

[22:06] Consistency between containers? Shared ownership of state or assets

It depends on how you build your app. The Docker containers have a shared storage where all the containers have access to the same data and state.

There's a system called kudu that makes this really simple.

You can also pull logs across all systems.

You can also use SSH in the browser

[25:23] What's painful about Linux and containers?

How is the application built and how does it