How to Deploy an ASP.NET Web API- and Browser-based Application to a Production Environment
- by user69508
(Please forgive if this is posted in an incorrect forum. We didn’t know exactly where to post it.)
We have an ASP.NET Web API single page application - a browser-based app running in IIS to serve up HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript, which talks to the ASP.NET Web API endpoint only to access a database and transfer JSON data. Everything is working great in our development environment - that is, we have one Visual Studio solution with an ASP.NET Web API project and two class library projects for data access. While development and testing on development boxes, using IIS Express to a localhost:port to run the site and access the Web API, everything is fine.
Now we need to move it to a production environment (and we’re having problems - or just not understanding what needs to be done).
The production environment is all internal (nothing will be exposed on the public Internet). There are two domains. One domain, the corporate domain, is where all users login normally. The other domain, the process domain, contains the SQL Server instance that our app and Web API will need to access.
The IT staff wants to put a DMZ between the two domains to house the IIS app and shield the users on the corporate domain from having access into the process domain directly. So, I guess what they want is:
corp domain (end users) <– firewall (open port 80) <– DMZ (web server running IIS) <– firewall (open port 80 or 1433????) <– process domain (IIS for Web API and SQL Server)
We’re developers and don’t really understand all the networking aspects, so we’re wondering how to deploy our browser/Web API application in this scenario.
Do we need to break up our application so that all the client code (HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript/images/etc.) is on the IIS server in the DMZ, while the Web API gets installed on the server in the process domain?
Or, does the entire app (client code and Web API) stay together on the IIS server in the DMZ, which then somehow accesses the SQL Server instance to get data?
From the IIS server and app in the DMZ, would you simply access the Web API on the server in the process domain by going to "http://server/appname/api/getitmes"?
In the second firewall between the DMZ and the process domain, would you have to open port 1433 or just port 80 since the Web API is a HTTP endpoint?
Or, is there some better way of deployment (i.e., how ASP.NET Web API single page applications written all in HTML5 and JavaScript supposed to be deployed to production environments?)?
I’m sure there are other questions, but we’ll start with these. Thanks!!!
(Note: the servers are Win2k8 R2, SQL Server 2k8 R2, and IIS 7.5.)
