So far we have learned and explored the fundamentals of ASP.NET Core 2.0 by developing applications that ran locally in our machines. The real value of these apps can be realized only when these apps are deployed and available on the internet, so that they can be accessed from virtually anywhere and everywhere on the planet. To do so, we need to learn to deploy our ASP.NET Core 2.0 apps in the cloud, Microsoft Azure. An obvious question that comes to mind is Why should I care about the cloud? In this chapter, we will answer this question and get introduced to Microsoft Azure, our cloud platform, and learn its basics. So far, we deliberately developed applications that did not do any data persistence and hence did not use a relational database. We will also learn to develop an end-to-end application that uses a relational database for data persistence and learn about Entity Framework Core in the process. We will grasp these concepts by developing a simple movie booking web app and then deploy this web app on Azure. Finally, we will integrate the Chatbot that we developed earlier in the book with our movie booking site. We have a lot of ground to cover, so let's get into the cloud!

We will cover the following  topics in this chapter:

• Introduction to the cloud
• Types of cloud
• Getting started with Azure