Deploying SaaS Apps to Azure
Deploy the Lumen Trail SaaS app to Azure across five deployment shapes — Static Web Apps, Azure Functions, Container Apps, custom domain with managed TLS, and (optional) AKS.
About This Course
Learn how to put a working SaaS application on real Microsoft Azure infrastructure. Walk through the five deployment shapes every SaaS team eventually picks between static site, serverless function, container-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and Kubernetes and ship the same Lumen Trail front-end and API five different ways. Each lesson pairs a short teaching moment with a hands-on lab in your claude-cloud-ops VS Code container; Claude Code writes the Bicep/Terraform, az commands, and YAML, you review it and watch it work. By the end of this course you will know when to pick each deployment shape, how to add a custom domain with managed TLS, and (optionally) how to run your first Kubernetes deployment on AKS.
Course Curriculum
6 Lessons
The five deployment shapes
Learn the five deployment shapes every SaaS team eventually picks between — static site, serverless function, container service, platform-as-a-service, and Kubernetes. For each shape, see one real-world example, the cost model, when to pick it, and when to avoid it. By the end of this lesson you will be able to look at a workload (a marketing site, a webhook handler, a REST API, a fleet of microservices) and name the deployment shape that fits it best — the exact mental model you will use across the four hands-on labs that follow.
Deploy a static site to Azure Static Web Apps - Lab Exercises
Deploy the Lumen Trail front-end as a static site on Microsoft Azure. Build the Next.js static output, create an Azure Static Web Apps resource, push the build artifacts, and watch the site load globally with sub-second latency. By the end of this lab you will have a working static site at an Azure URL and understand why "just upload the files" is the right answer for a huge share of SaaS marketing pages, docs sites, and admin dashboards.
Deploy a serverless function to Azure Functions - Lab Exercises
Deploy a single endpoint of the Lumen Trail API as a serverless function on Azure. Package the handler for Azure Functions, deploy it to a consumption plan, invoke the HTTPS trigger, and read the function's logs in Application Insights. By the end of this lab you will understand how Azure Functions scale from zero, when a function is the right shape for a workload (webhooks, image resizers, scheduled jobs), and the small catalog of gotchas (cold starts, timeouts, output bindings) you need to design around.
Deploy a containerized API to Azure Container Apps - Lab Exercises
Deploy the full Lumen Trail API as a container on Azure Container Apps. Build the image, push to Azure Container Registry, deploy a Container App, then split traffic across two revisions for a canary release. By the end of this lab you will understand why serverless containers (Azure Container Apps) are the single best default for new SaaS APIs on Azure today, how revisions and traffic splitting let you ship safely, and how to roll back when a new revision misbehaves.
Add a custom domain + managed TLS to Container Apps - Lab Exercises
Give the Container Apps API you deployed in the previous lab a real custom domain and automatic HTTPS. Create an Azure DNS zone, point your domain's nameservers, bind the domain to the Container App, and let Azure issue a managed TLS certificate. By the end of this lab you will understand how DNS, TLS, and ingress fit together on Azure, how managed certificates remove the single most painful operational chore in web infrastructure, and what the full chain from api.yourdomain.com to your Container Apps revision actually looks like.
First Kubernetes deployment on AKS (optional stretch) - Lab Exercises
Optional stretch lab for students who want their first look at Kubernetes. Create an AKS cluster, deploy the Lumen Trail API as a Kubernetes Deployment behind a Service and an Ingress, and roll out a new image. By the end of this lab you will have a working Kubernetes app on AKS and a grounded answer to the question "when do I actually need Kubernetes?" — hint: later than most teams reach for it. Marked optional — most SaaS products never need Kubernetes.