Does any of the words in the title make you excited? Great! After the previous article on Blazor, it’s high time to go deeper.
We’re gonna take another, still theoretical, dive. By the end of this read, you should roughly understand all the concepts mentioned and how Blazor makes them even more awesome.
Opportunity for .NET developers
I still remember the time when custom desktop applications were a big hit. I bet in some industries they still are. Then Internet revolution changed all the landscapes and web apps became far more superior. With that came lots of new frameworks for developers to use. Among them – the freshest gem – Blazor.
Before that, you couldn’t really get away from using at least some Java, JavaScript, or TypeScript to make your web projects interactive. Now new doors of opportunity opened for .NET devs. Having the ability to implement everything in C#, resulted in a far-reaching inclusion of back-end focused developers.
No worries, Blazor works on-premise
For big corporations, any changes in processes can have huge ripple effects, so they tend to delay them. Even small companies, having one product, struggle to make strategically important decisions. Migrating core business applications to Blazor and putting them in the cloud is definitely one of those challenges. But it doesn’t have to happen all at once. It’s possible to do it step by step, so you can feel more in control of each stage.
Should you choose to start from switching to Blazor, be confident that the upgraded app will still work on-premise. On top of that, Blazor is built on the .NET Core framework, which means it’s a cross-platform solution. Sounds good, isn’t it?
There would be little to no friction deploying it to any operating system or porting to any reverse proxy server. Whether you’ve chosen to, or have experience with, IIS, Apache, or Nginx – you won’t have any additional struggle.
But on-premise is no longer an efficient choice for hosting web applications. Most importantly – the costs of maintaining that kind of infrastructure highly outweigh its ROI. Furthermore, the stability and accessibility of your application will become questionable as soon as scalability becomes a problem.
That’s why migrating your solution to the cloud is an integral part of its transformation. Blazor, being a Microsoft product itself, has a lot of out-of-the-box services available within Azure that will solve all your on-premise struggles at a fraction of its cost.
Cloud just makes sense
Especially combining Blazor with cloud infrastructure. And elaborating on that topic deserves a series of its own. Luckily, we already have one on the Inspeerity blog. Piotr, a brilliant cloud architect and my workmate, wrote a couple of articles on clouds.
Check them if you want to learn:
- what is cloud
- what is cloud migration
- how your business can benefit from the cloud
- how to prepare for cloud transformation
In my article, I will only highlight a few deal-makers for the Azure Cloud and Blazor marriage:
- as you’re staying within the Microsoft family of products, all the .NET and Blazor updates will be available pretty much as soon as they’re released and without any additional workarounds (e.g. deploying on GCP would require additional Docker setup)
- maintenance and scale management is delegated to Azure services, so you avoid any additional costs that you would experience with an on-premise solution
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipelines enable automatization of the last stages of the development process, increasing your team efficiency and your profit margins as well
- for your Blazor WebAssembly apps, Azure has built-in SPA and Static Web App support for extra cost-optimization
- Azure SignalR Service – a fully autonomous and configurable, highly cost-effective system that handles concurrent SignalR connections for better scalability
- Azure Portal interface lets you scale up your app or database services dynamically, saving you time and money.
For more information, here’s a link to a presentation done on the last .NET Conf on those scalability topics and a link to the SWA deployment process.
Is Blazor here to stay?
That’s a vital question for any kind of further discussion, isn’t it? It pops up in conversations, not only in business but all over the Internet. The biggest argument against it says: it’s the next Silverlight. Fair enough. Silverlight was basically Blazor’s ancestor. It was the first Microsoft’s attempt at a web development takeover.
And yes, it failed miserably.
However, the difference between the two is so significant that I’m confident that history won’t repeat itself. Silverlight was running on its own plugin, that had to be installed on top of your browser (like Java or not so long ago – Flash). Blazor, on the other hand, is based on OWS (Open Web Standards). No proprietary formats are involved. It’s also an open-source framework. Both points explain why it’s so easily and welcomingly adopted by the market and developers.
It is a great time to consider taking the Blazor train. There are already plenty of production-ready applications that you can take a look at. Look them up if you need a proof of concept. And be sure that Blazor’s portfolio will rapidly grow. You name it, it’s there: CMS systems, through in-browser games, streaming services, IoT apps, data analytics systems, and machine learning projects – have a look here.
Is Blazor the future of web development?
Or maybe it’s just a brief fashion? It’s highly unlikely that Blazor will fail now, considering the adoption curve that’s already bending higher. If you look at the impact it has had on the development landscape and the inclusion it allowed to happen – it becomes even more unlikely. Blazor has frequently released improvements, and its community is quickly growing. It all indicates that there’s a bright future ahead. I’ve enjoyed this journey from Blazor’s infancy to see a huge potential in this framework. Moreover, I already had opportunities to create outstanding web applications using it. Currently working on another huge SaaS solution based on Blazor, I see that those projects are stable, scalable, and reliable. I also see a great development time improvement thanks to the flexibility of writing it all in C#.
Get in touch with us!
And hey, Piotr, myself, and our team of experts at Inspeerity would be happy to analyse your situation and guide you on a journey from the legacy way of delivering solutions to the cloud and Blazor’s new age of agile development. If you’re interested – give us a shout!
