Azure Services Part 4 — Azure App Services

This article series have been written as a partial requirement for the course : SENG 41283 : Distributed and Cloud Computing. The areas I discussed here are :

• setting up a sample environment in Azure cloud platform
• the cloud infrastructure setup for a simple PHP web application using the available services in Azure environment.

App Services

Azure App Service is an HTTP-based service for hosting web applications, REST APIs, and mobile back ends. You can develop in your favorite language, be it .NET, .NET Core, Java, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, or Python. Applications run and scale with ease on both Windows and Linux-based environments.

Azure App service enables users to build and host web apps, mobile back-ends and RESTful APIs in any programming language. App service supports Docker as well.

App Service not only adds the power of Microsoft Azure to your application, such as security, load balancing, autoscaling, and automated management. You can also take advantage of its DevOps capabilities, such as continuous deployment from Azure DevOps, GitHub, Docker Hub, and other sources, package management, staging environments, custom domain, and TLS/SSL certificates.

Currently, the Azure App Service platform contains these services:

Web Apps

• For running web and api applications in Azure

Mobile Apps

• For running the backend for mobile applications in Azure

Function Apps

• For running small blocks of code in Azure that can be triggered by outside sources, like a message on a queue

With this Article series let’s see how to deploy a small PHP application in Azure using Azure Services.

I created an App service called webserverhospitalSuwaShanthi which will be used integrate all files of my website. The application I have used for this project is a PHP web app.

Now you can see the web url for the web app to deploy PHP application in Azure environment.

For this, Azure provides several methods such as continuous integration using GitHub repo, Azure repo or Bitbucket repo and manual deployment using OneDrive, Dropbox or FTP.

My files are locally stored and therefore I have used manual deployment using an FTP connection.

To do this, navigate to Deployment Center and choose FTP. From the Dashboard, we can obtain the FTPS Endpoint, username and password to connect with FileZilla, which is the client tool I have used for this project to transfer files.

Once it’s done navigate to Configuration -> Default Document to add the Home Page file of the Project. In my case it’s indexHome.php.

Then you can use the URL to access to the web app.

Thank you!