dashboard: Design backend

[sprt]

Goals:

• Stateless at first
• Minimal cost
• Ease of deployment
  • Can we automatically deploy to prod every time a PR is merged to main?
  • Can we easily deploy a local dev environment?
• Ease of maintenance
• Ideally: Be able to authenticate each GH user individually so that users don't share a common rate limit. Pretty important so that malicious actors can't DoS us.

Things to look out for:

• What Azure service to host it on? App Service, Azure Functions, Container Instances
  • Argue pros and cons (e.g. I know Az Functions can have high latency)

[chris-krenz]

Per Aurelien's comments, using something like Functions might cause a latency problem with cold starts:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/understanding-serverless-cold-start/

In creating this proposal, I'll be sure to include a few different options with their pros and cons (and then a recommendation).