Can you implement a Chat Bot with Microsoft Bot Framework without Azure?

Microsoft Bot Framework is an amazing framework that people are using it more and more to build Bots these days, because it is so simple to put together a Bot very quick.

I have also published a post here a while ago, that you can go through and learn a bit more about this Microsoft Bot Framework if you are not familiar with it, but today, I am writing this to answer a different question.

Creating Bots in the Microsoft Bot Framework using Node.js

The story

So, when you first start going through the tutorials, somehow most people get the impression that they need to use Azure to host their Chat Bot API.

Though, using Azure to host your Chat Bot service will be very convenient and a good choice, but you don’t have to use Azure!

If you need to know how, keep reading…

What does a basic Chat Bot Application Architecture look like?

If you look at the following picture, you will see a basic Chat Bot Application architecture, built using Microsoft Bot Framework:

A basic Microsoft Bot Framework Architecture

As you can see, the first thing that happens, when a user interacts with your Bot, through one of the Channels (Skype, Slack, etc), those channels make some API call to your Chat Bot.

Now, as you can imagine, all those connectors are on public internet, and for them to be able to communicate to your Chat Bot API, your API also needs to be publicly accessible on the Internet.

Also, because they want to make sure the message or communication is secure, they require your Bot API to have SSL Certificate.

Now with that, you see that hosting the Bot API in Azure makes a lot of sense, because first of all, it is publicly available, and also all Azure websites come with SSL Certificate, so…