Kickstart projects with azd Templates

Introduction

In a fast-paced world of software development, finding the right frameworks and services that cater to diverse needs can be challenging. Today’s development landscape demands that developers continuously adapt and evolve their skill sets, often juggling multiple tools and mastery of technologies to stay competitive.

Current and emerging developer pain-points include:

• Having to make too many decisions facing an expansive selection of options during the entire development life cycle
• Difficulty in identifying and implementing industry’s best practices that could lead to potential inefficiencies and technical debt
• Lack of repeatability, making it difficult to deliver consistent results across different environments and development stages
• Increased complexity of integrating AI technologies into applications
• Lack of familiarity with deployment services to implement applications that are efficiently designed and configured to be secure and scale to meet the growing needs of users

Azure Developer CLI (azd)

The Azure Developer CLI (azd) is an open-source, developer-centric command-line (CLI) tool that is part of a wider ecosystem to help you accelerate the provisioning and deployment of applications to Azure. Long gone are the many arguments and flags typically used, Azd uses intuitive, developer-friendly commands that represent key development stages, boosting your overall productivity.

azd Templates

As part of this ecosystem, and the backbone to the CLI, azd uses blueprint project templates with:

• Proof-of-concept (PoC) starter code to help you kickstart your project without starting from scratch. These templates go beyond ‘hello-world’ examples, demonstrating how to build complex systems, allowing you to customize the code, or completely replace with your own,
• Everything you need to get a Fully managed end-to-end system/ application running on Azure, with configuration files to handle one-click deployments,
• Reusable Infrastructure as Code (IaC) assets to provision and maintain cloud services

Azd empowers:

• Every developer to focus on writing the best code and deployment infrastructure by keeping it all in one context
• Every startup to quickly prototype and deploy applications, accelerating innovation
• Every non-technical founder to understand and manage their projects through intuitive commands, allowing them to focus on business strategy and market growth
• Every student developer to learn industry best practices and apply them in their projects, while gaining hands-on experience with Azure, one of the leading cloud platforms, enhancing their resumes and employability

Finding azd Templates

The key to identifying the azd template that is right for you is first of all knowing what your application needs to do. Once you have an idea of what your application needs to do and the services required, you can search for the right template that most closely matches your needs in one of two places.

1. Visit the azd Template Gallery to get started with a range of battle-tested templates that offer a range of solutions.
2. If you don't find your use case there, then visit the AI Template Gallery to get started and search through AI specific application templates.

(All deployment instructions are included in the respective templates).

Once you have chosen and deployed the template of your choice, the rule of thumb is:

• use azd deploy if you change any of the application code
• use azd provision if you change of the infrastructure Bicep or Terraform code
• use azd up if you change both or want a quick re-deployment Below you can see some popular example JavaScript templates that the community have been using.

Template	Tech Stack	Architecture
Serverless AI Chat with RAG using LangChain.js	Lit Web components, TypeScript, Node.js, Langchain.js	Example use case: Customer Support Automation
ChatGPT + Enterprise data with Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Search	JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js	Example use case: Legal Document Analysis
React Web App with C# API and Cosmos DB for NoSQL on Azure	JavaScript, TypeScript, C#/ .NET, React	Example use case: HR Management Tool
Serverless Azure OpenAI Assistant Quick Start Function Calling	JavaScript	Example use case: Customer Support ChatBot
Azure OpenAI secure UI starter	Lit Web components, TypeScript, Node.js	Example use case: E-commerce Platform Personal Shopping Assistant
Serverless Azure OpenAI Quick Start with LlamaIndex (JavaScript)	JavaScript, Node.js

What’s Coming Next?

Stay tuned for an upcoming series that will dive deeper into these templates and more, showing the end-to-end deployment experience with azd.

Resources

1. azd Template Library
2. azd AI Template Gallery
3. What is the difference between the Azure Command Line Interface and Azure Developer Command Line Interface?
4. Azure Developer CLI (azd) Documentation