Python is a great language for building web apps, and Django is one of the most popular frameworks. It lets developers create web apps fast, including modern RESTful APIs, with security and scalability in mind.

I’ve been using Visual Studio Code and Azure for a while and was invited to share my experiences at Microsoft’s Channel9 studios. In these four short videos, I’ve shown Nina Zakharenko (@nnja), Senior Cloud Developer Advocate for Python at Microsoft, the entire lifecycle of a Django REST Framework application using the REST Framework tutorial app. We covered a lot of ground — from writing and debugging code with Visual Studio Code to bringing the app to the cloud using Azure Web Apps on Linux (just released in public preview) and adding Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery with Azure DevOps. I also demoed how it’s technically possible to run Django inside Azure Functions, the serverless/reactive application platform.

All the content for the demos is available in my repository carltongibson/rest-framework-tutorial on GitHub.

Part 1: Building Django apps with Visual Studio Code

I’m starting the mini-series by showing how Visual Studio Code helps building and debugging Django REST Framework apps with the Python extension, the integrated terminal, and more. Check the demo:

Part 2: Deploying Django services to Azure Web Apps

After building the app, I’ll bring it to the cloud and deploy it to Azure Web Apps. Best part: I’m doing all of this without leaving Visual Studio Code. See how:

Part 3: CI/CD with Azure Pipelines

Pipelines is part of Azure DevOps and lets you enable Continuous Integration and Delivery of your Django app, so it’s automatically deployed to Azure Web Apps (or anywhere else). Watch how easy it is to get started:

Part 4: Running serverless Django apps with Functions

The last video is a bit more experimental. I’ll take a Django app and run it on Azure Functions, making sure the code is executed in a serverless way, in response to incoming HTTP requests. See how:

Hope you enjoyed the videos. You can follow along with the videos and get started with Django REST Framework in Visual Studio Code and Azure using the instructions in my repository on GitHub. You can also check out the Python on Azure docs to get started, as well as the documentation for Python on Visual Studio Code.

Thanks for watching! Questions or feedback? Let us know in the comments below.