Cloud Migration for Angular Applications

What is Angular Cloud Migration?

Angular is an open source framework that lets you use HTML and TypeScript to build single-page applications (SPAs). It implements functionality as a collection of TypeScript libraries, which you can import into your applications.

Cloud application migration involves moving applications from one computing environment to a cloud environment. For example, you can move applications from an on-premises server to a cloud provider’s environment or from a public cloud to a private cloud. Cloud migration enables you to leverage cloud scalability to scale and update applications quickly.

Here are common cloud migration methods:

• Online transfer—involves using the public Internet or a private network connection to transfer applications and data. This method requires planning to ensure you have the necessary bandwidth for the transfer.
• Offline transfer—involves uploading local data onto an appliance and physically shipping the appliance to the public cloud provider of your choice. Once the appliance reaches its destination, the vendor uploads the data to the cloud.

There are common use cases for migrating Angular apps to the cloud:

• Applications with unpredictable loads—Angular apps that face unpredictable peaks in usage, such as seasonal promotions, can automatically scale in the cloud to accommodate loads.
• User generated content—Angular applications that allow users to upload files and share content require flexible bandwidth and scalable storage. The cloud provides elastically scalable, low cost storage for user uploaded data.
• High performance applications—Angular applications requiring very high performance can benefit from a cloud environment, because it can easily scale up resources, and can position the application in a cloud data center physically near to its users.

3 Cloud Migration Options for Angular Applications

AWS Amplify

AWS Amplify provides tools for building full-stack applications on AWS, including Amplify Hosting, a git-based workflow designed to help you host full-stack serverless web applications with continuous deployment. It supports popular SPA frameworks, including Angular, and static site generators like Eleventy and Gatsby.

You can use AWS Amplify to host your Angular applications on AWS. It lets you manage production and staging environments, connect applications to custom domains, and preview changes during code review. It provides functionality for end-to-end testing for quality improvement and atomic deployments to eliminate maintenance windows.

Azure App Service

Azure App Service lets you host web applications, mobile back-ends, and REST APIs in the Azure cloud. This HTTP-based service enables you to develop in any programming language, including Angular, and run and scale your applications on Windows and Linux environments.

The service provides a managed production environment, automatically patching and maintaining the operating system and language frameworks. It lets you manage Angular applications using the cross-platform command-line interface (CLI) or Azure PowerShell. You can use Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code to streamline code creation, deployment, and debugging.

When using Azure App Service, you can leverage Microsoft Azure services and capabilities, such as security, auto scaling, automated management, load balancing, and DevOps capabilities. You can also use WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla application templates, available on the Azure Marketplace.

Google Cloud App Engine

Google App Engine (GAE) is a fully managed serverless platform that provides scalable hosting for web applications. It is delivered as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) product for building, testing, deploying, and hosting web applications in the cloud, including Angular applications.

GAE lets you record data and run diagnostics to gain insights into your application’s performance. It also provides security features, letting you define access policies using the GAE firewall and manage Transport Layer Security or Secure Sockets Layer certificates for free. You can also route traffic requests to different application versions.

Conclusion

There are many ways to migrate Angular apps to the cloud. The three leading cloud providers provide platform as a service (PaaS) offerings that can help you not only migrate Angular to the cloud but also manage the end-to-end DevOps process within their cloud environment. Like many cloud offerings, this can be highly convenient, but also raises the risk of vendor lock in.

If you’re concerned about building your entire development environment around a specific cloud provider, another option is to “lift and shift” your Angular app and run it self-managed in a cloud server. This is more complex to manage, but will give you much more control, while enjoying the scalability and high reliability of a cloud environment.