How to speed up an Azure web application deployment with lots of files?

Question

At my work we have a .NET web application that is hosted in Azure. We use TeamCity to build our application and Octopus to deploy the application to Azure. We've been noticing that our deployments have started to increase in duration so I've been looking at the Octopus logs and it appears that the duration is mainly due to the multitude of front-end files we are using. We have recently implemented React so we have the node_modules folder plus all the other .css and .js plugin files that our front-end uses.

Are there any strategies to deal with said files and reduce the burden on deployments? Open to crazy ideas like zipping or using Docker containers - anything to make the deployments scale better as our application gets larger.

Answer 1

Why not go with the hype and use webpack ? As opposed to other hypes.. this is practical and actually useful.

Image source: http://www.pro-react.com/materials/appendixA/