📖 This lesson's lecture slides can be found - here.

We've finished building the application that we've wanted so we'll now focus on deployment. There's no use in having a great app if we can't deploy it for others to use!

Before we dive into what form of deployment we're going to conduct, let's talk about an important topic that might be obvious to some and pretty new to others, and that is cloud computing. Microsoft Azure's documentation on cloud computing has a very good paragraph in introducing what this means:

"... cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale..."

Why is the topic of cloud computing important within the concept of deployment? Before cloud computing became widely adopted, if we wanted to deploy an application over the web (like what we want to do with TinyHouse), we most likely had to:

• Buy the hardware (e.g. CPU, RAM, Hard Drive, Routers, etc.).

• Install the hardware.

• Setup networking and security.

• Install an operating system (e.g. Linux).

• Install any other required software to run our application (e.g. the Node runtime environment).

• And once all of the above steps are complete, host our application on the internet.

What happens if our CPU/RAM (or any other piece of hardware) fails? Our app would become offline. What happens if our app becomes very popular and our hardware cannot keep up? Our app would become sluggish and we'll have to buy more hardware. What if there is a usage peak at certain hours of the day? We'll have to buy hardware to handle just that peak, and for the remainder of the day, some of our hardware might be unnecessary to have.