Full-Stack .NET + React Application with Enterprise CI/CD

🚀 Overview

This repository demonstrates an end-to-end CI/CD implementation for a full-stack enterprise-style application consisting of:

• ⚙️ Backend: .NET (ASP.NET Core)
• 🎨 Frontend: React
• 🗄️ Database: MySQL
• 🔄 CI/CD: GitHub Actions & Azure DevOps
• ☁️ Target Platforms: Azure VM, AWS EC2, Docker containers

⚠️ Important:
The primary focus of this project is DevOps automation, CI/CD orchestration, and cloud readiness, not application feature development.

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🧩 Business Context

In real-world enterprise environments, applications are rarely single-stack. Most systems consist of:

• Separate frontend and backend teams
• Shared databases or managed services
• Multiple deployment environments
• Strict CI/CD and release controls

This project simulates such a setup and focuses on how DevOps pipelines handle multi-technology applications reliably and repeatably.

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🏗️ Application Architecture

┌───────────────────┐ ┌────────────────────┐ │ React Frontend │ ---> │ .NET Backend API │ └───────────────────┘ └────────────────────┘ │ ▼ ┌──────────┐ │ MySQL │ └──────────┘

Each component is built, tested, and packaged independently while being orchestrated through a single CI/CD pipeline.

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📂 Repository Structure

. ├── elearn-backend │ ├── Controllers │ ├── Models │ ├── Data │ ├── Dockerfile │ └── Program.cs │ ├── elearn-frontend │ ├── public │ ├── src │ └── package.json │ ├── .github/workflows │ ├── cicd_workflow.yml │ └── workflow_net.yml │ ├── azure-pipelines.yml └── README.md

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🔄 CI/CD Design

GitHub Actions (CI)

The GitHub Actions workflow performs:

• ✅ Source code checkout
• ✅ Frontend dependency installation, build & tests
• ✅ Backend dependency restore, build & tests
• ✅ MySQL service container for integration testing
• ✅ Manual and automated triggers

Key CI Features

• Uses MySQL as a service container to mimic real integration tests
• Builds frontend and backend independently
• Ensures failures are caught early before deployment

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Azure DevOps Pipelines (CD)

The Azure DevOps pipeline is designed for:

• Controlled deployments
• Environment-specific releases
• Artifact-based delivery

This mirrors how many enterprises separate:

• CI (GitHub) → CD (Azure DevOps)

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🐳 Containerization Strategy

• Backend includes a Dockerfile
• Application is container-ready for:
  • Docker-based deployments
  • Future Kubernetes adoption
• Enables cloud-agnostic deployments

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☁️ Deployment Targets

This application is designed to be deployed on:

• 🔵 Azure Virtual Machines
• 🟠 AWS EC2 instances
• 🐳 Docker containers

The CI/CD pipeline ensures that the same build artifacts can be deployed across multiple platforms with minimal changes.

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🔐 Security & Best Practices

• No hardcoded credentials in pipelines
• Environment variables used for sensitive configuration
• Database access controlled via CI service containers
• Separation of CI and CD responsibilities

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🧠 Design Decisions & Trade-offs

• Single repo, multi-component setup for easier pipeline orchestration
• Service containers used instead of mocks for realistic testing
• Pipeline-first approach, app kept intentionally simple
• Designed for extensibility (Kubernetes, cloud-native services)

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📌 Author

Bhabya Bharti
DevOps Engineer | Cloud | CI/CD | Terraform | Containers