Building Custom Ecommerce Solutions On The Cheap for Non-Profits With Azure & Stripe

Building Custom Ecommerce Solutions on the Cheap for Non-Profits With Azure & Stripe

'Doin fun stuff on the web with Azure'

What is this talk about

• eCommerce on the cheap
• Getting free stuff (as a nonprofit)
• Exploring Azure
• Thoughts on coding outside of work
• 🌟Lessons I've learned🌟

Why am I giving this talk

• Demo my own App
• Volunteer your time!
• Sometimes you get paid!
• Responsibility
• Learn by Bootstrapping

0: Nonprofit

1:  App Overview
2: Stripe & Azure

3: CoreUI & Auth

4: Functions
5: Conclusions

0: Evidence Foundation

What is the Evidence Foundation?

• "The Foundation’s mission is to support initiatives in evidence-based health care through training, mentorship, education, and collaboration."

What do they do?

• Facilitate the basic principles of guideline methodology, including how to critically appraise the evidence, grade the quality of the evidence, and move from evidence to recommendations by using GRADE.

0: Evidence Foundation

What does that mean?

• Think About Political Literacy

What do they do?

​How did I get connected with them?

0: Getting Free Stuff: Azure

Azure Cloud Solutions for Nonprofits

• $3500 USD in Azure Credits per year
• $1500 USD in Azure Active Directory Premium Credits per year
• Discounts on other MS products like PowerBI, O365 E1, etc.
• Any organization recognized by the IRS as exempt from federal income tax - 501(c)(3)

0: Getting Free Stuff: Other

GitHub for Nonprofits

• Organizational account (unlimited repos), Discount

Stripe for Nonprofits

• Partial Fee Reduction (Rate Not Published)

Google for Nonprofits

• Drive + GSuite

1. Legacy Application

1: Legacy App

• Evidence Foundation Legacy Site

Express app with themed html/jquery/*.js frontend

2: Data & Payment

Payment Form

2: Data & Payment

• React, ReactStrap
• Stripe
• Azure App Service
• Azure CosmosDB

2: Interlude - CountUp

3. Dashboard

Dashboard

3: Dashboard/Exports

• CoreUI
• Azure Functions
• Azure AD

Application/User Walkthrough

Retrospective

• Watch your own legacy codebase grow!
• Would you do it 'the right way'?
• All code becomes embarrassing five minutes after it was written.
• Optimize for your own developer comfort.

Front End: React

• Why use React?
  • I like React

• No But Seriously
• Use Vue if you like Vue, etc

Payment Processing: Stripe

• Why use stripe?
  • Bless me with the ability to never have to store CC info anywhere on my server 🙏
• Is it easy to integrate?
  • Premade React Components
  • Invoicing
  • Webhooks

Stripe React Integrations

Stripe React Integrations

Stripe React Integrations

Stripe Invoices

Stripe Invoices

Stripe Webhooks

Azure - Application Service

Azure - Application Service

Azure - CosmosDB

• Document Database
• Selected snippets from the Azure CosmosDB overview & Documentation:
  • "battle-tested"
  • "multi-master replication protocol"
  • "<10-ms latencies for reads indexed writes at the 99th percentile, all around the world."
• What does that mean?
  • Massive overkill for my needs

Azure - CosmosDB

• Multiple APIs
  • SQL
  • Cassandra
  • MongoDB
  • Gremlin
  • Table

CosmosDB

Retrospective

• Projects this size are incredible learning opportunities:
  • Use Yup instead of rolling my own input validation logic
  • Think about state management earlier
• CosmosDB's per-collection billing model.
• Tests
• Build processes
• Containerization (App Service Weirdness)

AD

Provides IIAS (Identiy as a Service) for organizations - secure your cloud resources with Azure AD

AD B2C

Provides a method for building a Consumer Application Identity Repository - the key takeaway is anyone can sign up with your login/signup policies.

Azure AD/B2C

Azure AD - Registering 'Apps'

Azure AD

Azure B2C Policies

Azure B2C Policies

Retrospective

• Azure AD is for cloud services, B2C is for customers.
• B2C lets you provide a federated identity solution for everyone.
• Secure your web api's with AD, not B2C.

3: Azure Functions

• Serverless
• Triggers & Bindings
• LOTS of built-in goodies
  • Metrics
  • Performance info
  • Analytics
  • Function interaction map

3: Azure - Functions

🙌 VS Code Integration 🙌

Azure Functions Auth

Function Bindings

3: Retrospective

• Consider not using Mongoose/CosmosDB Mongo API. (SQL Bindings etc)
• Do everything with Functions? Why am I still writing express routes?
• Hot Take Alert
• 🔥 Consider Going Relational 🔥