Azure services for hosting a static site

Question

I'm looking to host an entirely static site in Azure and I have the following requirements in decreasing order of priority: reliable, low-maintenance (easily configurable/deployable), performant. I need to run a grunt command (requires some Node.js packages) to generate my html files after cloning/pulling from my git repo.

I'm looking at a few different options:

1. Plain VM hosting Apache + Varnish with load balancers and/or Traffic Manager in front
2. App Services (aka Web App) with Traffic Manager and Blades in different geo locations
3. App Service with CDN

The first option allows for the most customization but is pretty cumbersome. Second option is a more confined space trying to work within the App Services framework but there are some resources online to do parts of this. Third option has the same limitations as 2 but might be more performant and cheaper if I can figure out how to do this.

What considerations am I missing and are there any other alternatives I could pursue within Azure?

Answer 1

Since this is a static site, I recommend deploying your site in Azure Storage optionally adding CDN.

There is a guide for static sites on Azure Storage here, and there is a guide for hooking up CDN to your storage here.

The benefits are:

• Very reliable. Has the same SLAs as Azure Storage
• Very low maintenance. Lower maintenance than the three options you suggested because don't have to concern yourself with all the additional details that app services requires. Don't have to deploy any software.
• Performant. Again Azure Storage has pretty good performance goals, and performance can be improved by adding CDN
• Low cost. Azure Storage will have lower cost than the other options because you only pay for storage costs and bandwidth used not cost of running machines.
• Easy deployment. Azure Storage offers several methods of uploading content, which should make automating deployments easy.