Overview

Teaching: 30 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How can I serve out my data via a web portal

• What do I need to learn in order to accomplish this?

• What if I don’t want to spend my life being a systems administrator and a webmaster?

Objectives

• Use available cloud services to deploy your web app

• Build an API to get to your data - it’s easier than you think!

• Visualize your data on your web portal - it’s easier than you think!

Azure and Visual Studio

• Easy integration, one step deployment The equivalent of Azure web apps on AWS is the AWS Elastic Beanstalk. However, Azure makes it easy for you to deploy a web app with pre-built templates. In this demo I used the pre-canned Django web framework in Visual Studio to deploy my app.

• Building your web app in the cloud reduces the need to manage network security issues and/or maintain your own server.

• Why use Django?
• Clean, easy-to-understand Python based web framework.
• Good documentation
• Easily integrated with databases

Steps to building an API (and the related tools)

I have some data on an Azure virtual machine. I have climate data in netcdf and modeled streamflow and evapotranspiration data in ASCII. I want to do a few things with it:

1. Allow users to subset the streamflow data by date and return it in a .csv file or JSON format- great for developing web applications
2. Allow users to view a plot of my streamflow data
3. Allow users to visualize some spatial data - in this case, my ET values - leaflet
4. Allow users to visualize or play around with netCDF data
5. Build the engine for tunneling into an Azure virtual machine (good for being able to run packages/software via a web portal!) - Paramiko ~ for implementing ssh in python

Key Points

• Azure and Visual Studio

---