Azure Tools for the Apple Seeds Accelerator
TLDR; This post outlines a select list of Azure tools and documentation for the Appleseeds Seeds Accelerator Cohort #6 that is being shared publicly since it maybe useful to others.
If you don’t have an Azure Subscription you can get a free account using the link below.
About SEEDS
Appleseeds is an Israeli nonprofit that was founded in 2000 with the aim of bridging Israel’s growing Startup Nation to underrepresented communities in Israel’s social and geographic periphery. Appleseeds promotes digital equality in Israel by developing and implementing programs in the areas of technology, employment, and life skills.
SEEDS Accelerator is a technology business accelerator operated by Appleseeds Academy. It is a joint venture between the Ramla municipality and youth center and Maof, the operational arm of the Ministry of Economy and Industry’s agency for small and midsize businesses.
The program is for entrepreneurs who have an idea or very early stage venture and whose solution or product is technological in nature. The program offers innovative professional tools for developing the project, guidance by experienced mentors, networking opportunities, and exposure to and meetings with investors.
What is Azure?
Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud computing services to help your organization meet its business challenges. Azure gives you the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive, global network using your preferred tools and frameworks.
Getting Started With Azure
The first place to go for getting started with Azure is the Microsoft Learn Azure Fundamentals Course:
An additional list of my 5 top pics for getting started with Azure from Microsoft Learn course can be found here:
An additional in depth getting started walk-through can be found here:
Key Azure Products Important for Seeds
Once you understand and have reviewed the key fundamental storage, event processing, compute and networking services you should check out the following services.
1) Azure App Service and Hosted Apps
Use Azure App Service to create powerful cloud apps for web and mobile clients running on any platform or device faster than ever before. This service should be evaluated for anyone looking to make a quick frontend web app. Documentation and getting started code samples can be found in the link below.
Azure additionally supports static hosted web apps if you’d like to learn more about this check the documentation out here.
2) Azure Functions
Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in Azure or third party service as well as on-premises systems.
Two nice getting started tutorials for Web and ML can be found below:
3) Github Actions
GitHub Actions help you automate your software development workflows in the same place you store code and collaborate on pull requests and issues. You can write individual tasks, called actions, and combine them to create a custom CI/CD workflow to build, test, package, release, or deploy any code project on GitHub.
Below is a list of Azure Templates to help you get started with this Journey.
4) Azure Synapse, CosmosDB and Data Explorer
Azure Synapse is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources — at scale
Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s globally distributed, multi-model database service. With a click of a button, Cosmos DB enables you to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage across any number of Azure regions worldwide
Azure Data Explorer is a fast, fully managed data analytics service for real-time analysis on large volumes of data streaming from applications, websites, IoT devices, and more. You can use Azure Data Explorer to collect, store, and analyze diverse data to improve products, enhance customer experiences, monitor devices, and boost operations.
5) Azure ML Service
The Azure Machine Learning Service provides several ways to train machine learning models, from code first solutions using the SDK to low code solutions such as AutoML and the Visual Designer.
To learn more check out the documentation.
As well as my post:
6) Azure Kubernetes Service
Kubernetes is open-source software that helps deploy and manage containerized applications at scale. AKS is a managed Kubernetes Service that orchestrates a cluster of Azure VMs, schedules containers, automatically manages service discovery, incorporates load balancing, and tracks resource allocation
For getting started check out the following resource and the docs.
Next Steps:
Hopefully this document provides a strong getting started point for AppleSeeds Start Ups to successfully start engaging with Azure and empowers them to turn their ideas into reality.
I also suggest checking out the following Azure Developer blogs and youtube channels and architectural best practices:
If you have any other questions about theses services, resources or how to apply them to your project, feel free to reach out to me in the comments, on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Also if you are based in Israel and are looking for a face to face architecture review or technical support, check out Meet the Guru. This is your opportunity to meet our technical experts free of charge and are here to support you as you scale your startup.
About the Author
Aaron (Ari) Bornstein is an AI researcher with a passion for history, engaging with new technologies and computational medicine. As an Open Source Engineer at Microsoft’s Cloud Developer Advocacy team, he collaborates with Israeli Hi-Tech Community, to solve real world problems with game changing technologies that are then documented, open sourced, and shared with the rest of the world.
