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Hosting a RESTful API

I'm a C# ASP.NET junior dev and have worked with Code First C# Databases, RESTful API's, MVC & Vue (a frontend framework sort of like React) to create websites.
Now at work and during my education, I've never handled deployment.
At this time I have a personal project. I have succesfully hosted my relational MySQL Database on phpMyAdmin and can update it from my local desktop.
My hosting site let me know they do not host C# or anything of the sort.
I found some posts suggesting Azure, AWS, others, but for every post I find I find equal people protesting those.
What is a good site to host my first REST API? I'm looking for something that can go beyond Minimum Viable Product and I'd like to host my website under the hosting service I'm currently using (so not paired hosting with the API).
What would the costprice look like for an API that's deployed and being used by clients?
I realize this cost depends on the amount of traffic, but assume a basic API used for, let's say, posting orders in an online shop (though website/app/w.e, it all would communicate through the API).
Any tips are welcome as I feel I'm swimming in the dark researching this.
Thank you

Any hosting service that grants you real access to a machine will be able to run your API as some specialized for the .net/core ecossystem.
I supposed you know about php based on phpMyAdmin service and the ecossystem of hosts that support php, although cheaper they do not exactly give you access to the machine and probably will not support .net/core as inumerous others tech stacks.
As a Junior Developer I believe you should have a little bit of practice in any deployment ecossystem so I encorage you to try most of the big clouds (Azure, GCP, AWS), but also some smaller hosts to gain experience and understand a bit more about the differences in deployment and ecosystem.
Azure will be really easy, you can create an account and post your API without any costs using an free WebApp, VS will even have publishing tools that will handle 90% of the job, GCP will be a little trickier and will require you to know a bit about containers and clusters, if you go for a non specilized host like digitalocean you will need to understand more about the Operational system and associated servers/controllers to deploy and publish
about the cost part is a lot more difficult. It will depend on the host that you are using and the load (process, memory, size, and throughput of data). In my experience I had some very small-scale APIs that required more processing or memory to accomplish some tasks like PDF generation than a medium-scale API that only had json data transaction

Is it possible to make HTTP calls to applications outside of Azure from a web API running in Azure?

Is it possible to make HTTP calls to applications outside of Azure from a web API running in Azure?
I'm trying to connect a ASP.NET web API in Azure to a wpf application that runs on a PC at my company. Both the applications request data from each other using HTTP calls with JSON. This works fine locally because i can use localhost but
when running the web API in Azure the web API can't reach the wpf application
I have looked into Azure Point-to-Site and Site-to-Site connections but most examples that i found show connection with a VM in Azure and nothing about web API's.
Thanks in advance!

I still don't get your scenario even after reading all the comments, however here's a shot in the dark.
First of all, no, there are no restrictions as to what destination you may call from Azure, yes that includes the dark web, although not necessarily a recommended destination for both traffic and tourism alike.
For the second part, if what you're calling is behind a firewall and your API runs in Azure App Service, take a look at Hybrid Connections, it's built as a solution to that exact scenario, no IPsec or firewall rules are in play. The connectivity from on-prem will be outbound.

Azure Redis Cache development

I am trying to implement Azure Redis Cache in my app. When I see the documents they say I have to define a cache storage in the Azure online tool. I am wondering is there a way to skip that step and use Redis for development without using the actual server thing?

You can install Redis locally and use localhost. That might be one of your options even though I don't think it's faster.
You can download it and install it from here.

You can run Redis server locally, and start the experiment. But if you have decided to use Azure Redis, you should develop toward the real one as early as possible. Several reasons:
Azure Redis supports SSL and this is the default port. You should use this.
Azure Redis has high availability support through master slave.
Azure Redis provide Cluster support.
It might experience unexpected patching process causing temporarily data loss
These things are not easily setup and test locally.

azure cache on localhost

I'm developing an application to run in azure.
I'm making use of the azure cache, however when I run this locally I don't want to connect up to Azure to use the cache because it's a bit slow and tedious.
Can you run the cache locally?
[EDIT]
This is .Net C#

Unfortunately, you do need to connect to azure to test the windows azure cache service. Read this for more info: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg278342.aspx

You can use Windows Server AppFabric Cache when local debug. It utilizes very similar configuration and program mode, which means almost all you need to change is the cache server IP and access token.
But I'd better to create a separated Cache layer to isolate the cache operations. For example introduces ICache interface with Add, Get, Remove, etc. methods. Then you can implement the Azure Cache, Memcached, In-Proc Cache, etc. in vary cases.
There's a good cache layer you might be interested in, check the ServiceStack project at GitHUB https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/tree/master/src/ServiceStack.Interfaces/CacheAccess

It's not possible. To use the windows azure caching service locally, you'll always have to route your request to azure, which adds a serious delay on top of the request.
To property test your cache, you need to deploy your service in azure.
As others said, you can use Windows Server AppFabric caching locally, but be warned, there are some differences between the Windows Server AppFabric caching and the Windows Azure caching service, like for example the notifcation based invalidation on local cache items is not supported in azure. Make sure not to use any of these features while developing locally, or you might get surprised when deploying your service to the cloud.
Only the timeout based invalidation on local cache is supported for the windows azure caching service. Windows azure caching service is designed to be used for your cloud services, so it makes sense it's kinda crappy when using with on on-premise application.

Azure AppFabric caching uses a subset of the functionality of Windows Server AppFabric caching. If you're willing to setup a server in house with the cache installed you could probably get something comparable to using the Azure cache. I haven't tried this myself, so while I know that the code you'd need to write is more or less the same between the two, I'm not sure how different the configs need to be.
Chances are though that it's going to be a lot less time and effort to just use the Azure cache.

This article specifically talks about what you are trying to do. Create a caching "infrastructure" that switches between local and distributed cache based on configuration(s):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh708748.aspx

Now you can use azure in-role cache and try locally using emulator

Is it possible to create a standalone, C# web service deployed as an EXE or Windows service?

Is it possible to create a C# EXE or Windows Service that can process Web Service requests? Obviously, some sort of embedded, probably limited, web server would have to be part of the EXE/service. The EXE/service would not have to rely on IIS being installed. Preferably, the embedded web service could handle HTTPS/SSL type connections.
The scenario is this: customer wants to install a small agent (a windows service) on their corporate machines. The agent would have two primary tasks: 1) monitor the system over time and gather certain pieces of data and 2) respond to web service requests (SOAP -v- REST is still be haggled about) for data gathering or system change purposes. The customer likes the idea of web service APIs so that any number of clients (in any language) can be written to tap into the various agents running on the corporate machines. They want the installation to be relatively painless (install .NET, some assemblies, a service, modify the Windows firewall, start the service) without requiring IIS to be installed and configured.
I know that I can do this with Delphi. But the customer would prefer to have this done in C# if possible.
Any suggestions?

Yes, it's possible, you may want to have a look at WCF and Self Hosting.

Yes, it is possible (and fairly easy).
Here is a CodeProject article showing how to make a basic HTTP server in C#. This could easily be put in a standalone EXE or service, and used as a web service.

One technology you might want to check out is WCF. WCF can be a bit of a pain to get into but there's a great screencast over at DNRTV by Keith Elder that shows how to get started with WCF in a very simple fashion.
http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=135

You could take a look at HttpListener in the .Net framework.

I would highly recommend WCF. It would fit very well into a product like you are describing. There are a good number of books available.

Sure, you can do that. Be sure to change the Output Type of the project to Console Application. Then, in your Main function, add a string[] parameter. Off of some switch that you receive on the command line, you can branch to ServiceBase.Run to run as a Windows Service or branch to some other code to run a console application.

This question is somewhat older but since I needed something similar some time ago it felt like this question is still relevant.
I wrote a small Rest-API with NancyFx and OWIN. OWIN is a standard interface between .Net applications and web servers. With OWIN it is possible to create a self-hosted WEB-API. Nancy on the other hand is
a lightweight, low-ceremony, framework for building HTTP based
services on .NET ¹
The combination of those two makes it possible to create a self-hosted C# Web service.
I am quite sure that there are many more possibilities to create something like this by now but since I used it like this I thought the Information might be useful to someone.