Building a Two-Tier IaaS Web Application in Azure:

In today’s digital age, web applications have become a fundamental part of modern businesses. They enable companies to offer their services to a global audience without geographical limitations. However, building a web application from scratch requires a lot of infrastructure, resources, and security measures. In this blog post, I’ll discuss how I built a two-tier IaaS web application in Azure.

Azure is a cloud computing platform that offers various services such as virtual machines, databases, and storage, making it an ideal platform for building web applications. The two-tier architecture involves separating the application’s front-end and back-end tiers, ensuring scalability, availability, and security.

Here are the elements I used to build the web application:

Nginx Servers:

Nginx is a widely used web server that can function as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP cache. In this web application, Nginx servers were used to handle incoming traffic and distribute it to the backend servers.

Postgres Databases:

Postgres is an open-source relational database management system that offers various features, including ACID compliance, high availability, and scalability. Postgres databases were used in this web application to store data.

Application Gateway:

An application gateway is a load balancer that manages web traffic to applications and offers security features such as SSL/TLS termination, WAF, and authentication. It was used in this web application to secure it from external threats.

Internal Load Balancer:

An internal load balancer is a private load balancer that distributes traffic to backend servers within a virtual network. In this web application, an internal load balancer was used to distribute traffic to Postgres servers for redundancy.

Azure Key Vault:

Azure Key Vault is a secure cloud service used for storing certificates, keys, and other confidential data. In this web application, Azure Key Vault was used to store certificates and SSH keys.

Separate VNets:

A virtual network (VNet) is a logically isolated network within the Azure cloud. In this web application, separate VNets were used for the front-end and back-end to ensure security.

Deployment Tools:

For deploying the infrastructure, Terraform and Ansible were utilized. Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that allows for the creation and management of infrastructure. Ansible is a configuration management tool that automates application deployment.

With these components in place, a two-tier IaaS web application was created in Azure. The Nginx servers received incoming traffic and distributed it to the backend servers, which consisted of Postgres databases. The internal load balancer distributed traffic to the Postgres servers for redundancy. The application gateway provided security features such as SSL/TLS termination and authentication. Certificates and SSH keys were securely stored in Azure Key Vault, and separate VNets were used for security. Finally, Terraform and Ansible were used to deploy the infrastructure.

In conclusion, building a two-tier IaaS web application in Azure requires careful planning, attention to detail, and knowledge of the various services offered by Azure. With the above elements in place, I was able to create a scalable, available, and secure web application that met the business requirements.