Where we should host remote event recievers? can they be hosted on any server exposed to the internet over it should be inside Azure?

Question

I am in the process of migrating our SharePoint 2013 on-premises to Office 365. Now inside our SharePoint on-premises 2013 I have 7 event receivers which get fired when items are (created, creating, updated, updating, deleted and deleting). Now I want to start converting these server side event receivers to be remote event receivers. so I got these installed/created inside my windows machine:-

1. Visual studio professional 2015, with all the necessary dependencies for SharePoint.

2. I created the site collections inside our office 365 farm, and I move the data and documents from our on-premises sites.

Now I want to start developing the remote event receivers. but not sure where I need to deploy these remote event receivers? For example when I developed the server side ER, I deployed them inside the same SharePoint application server. but for the remote event receivers where these should be deployed? for example under an Azure server? or remote ER can be deployed under any windows server which are exposed to the internet ??

second question. now when I want to test my server-side ER I run the server-side ER from visual studio, and i can even install/deploy the ER from Visual studio directly. so when it comes to remote ER how I can test my remote ER prior to deploying them ??

Thanks for any help and feedback. Regards

Answer 1

You can deploy a remote event receiver to any web server anywhere you want, as long as it's exposed over the Internet. There's nothing special about Azure in this respect, except that it's convenient and likely to be familiar to developers on the Microsoft stack. You'll need to re-implement your code since the development models are different (remote APIs versus server side code).

As far as testing goes, that's always been a gap in the development patterns for remote event receivers. But you can run your service in localhost and use ngrok to proxy the web traffic back to your machine. I explain a a little more detail how I set up remote event receivers in a blog post I wrote.