Azure App Service Plan Tiers
Edit 1: added Hybrid Connections
App Service Plan Overview
If you want to host a web app, mobile app or API app in Azure, you need an App Service Plan. Basically, this is the compute resource for your app. You have the choice between 5 SKUs:
- Free
- Shared
- Basic
- Standard
- Premium
It’s easy to understand how the compute resource is growing between each tier. However, it’s not only a matter of compute power or storage space. As you are going up in the SKUs, you will also get more features. So even if you don’t need more computing power, in some cases you will have to scale up your App Service Plan to get some required feature.
I had a hard time finding a quick overview and comparison of the SKUs. The only place I found where you can get some detail is in the Azure Portal when you choose your pricing tier (while creating a new App Service Plan or scaling up).
The App Service Plan pricing page gives you some information, but not in great details. And another annoying thing is when it comes to the instance size, the naming is not consistent between the web page display (pricing page / portal) and the API (PowerShell, CLI, RM template).
Example: B1 = Tier Basic + Size Small
For Azure SQL Database or VM, it’s again a bit different.
App Service Plan Size specs
Basic, Standard and Premium are sharing the same available sizes and specs.
App Service Plan size translation:
- 1 = Small = 1 Core + 1.75 GB RAM
- 2 = Medium = 2 Core + 3.5 GB RAM
- 3 = Large = 4 Core + 7GB RAM
It’s quite easy to remember, the Small size just doubles each time. Also note that the Free and Shared are only available in one size.
- F1 = 1 Core + 1 GB RAM
- D1 = 1 Core + 0.5 GB RAM
In both case the core is shared with other tenants, and each tenant is allowed for a certain time of CPU per day (see below).
App Service Plan Tiers features
Even if you go to the official documentation, they will give you some hints about the features of each App Service Plan tier, but it’s all over the place and it didn’t see all features on one page. I will try to summarize here all the features for each tier.
Free (F):
- 1 size only -> F1
- CPU resource 60 CPU minutes / day
- 1 GB Storage
- 32 bit application only
- Debugger support only one connection
Shared (D):
- 1 size only -> D1
- CPU resource 240 CPU minutes / day
- 1GB storage
- Custom domains
- 32 bit application only
- Debugger support only one connection
Basic (B):
- 3 sizes -> B1, B2, B3
- 10GB storage
- Custom domains
- SSL support (SNI SSL only)
- Scale out -> up to 3 instances (manual scale only!)
- 32 bit and 64 bit application supported
- Debugger support 5 connections
- SLA 99.95%
- Hybrid Connections up to 5 connections
Standard (S):
- 3 sizes -> S1, S2, S3
- 50GB storage
- Custom domains
- SSL support (SNI SSL + IP SSL)
- Scale out -> up to 10 instances (auto scale)
- Daily backup
- 5 deployment slots (staged deployment)
- Traffic manager support
- 32 bit and 64 bit application supported
- Debugger support 5 connections
- SLA 99.95%
- Hybrid Connections up to 25 connections
Premium (P):
- 3 sizes -> P1, P2, P3 (an ExtraLarge size is shown by the API)
- 250GB storage
- Custom domains
- SSL support (SNI SSL + IP SSL)
- Scale out -> up to 20 instances (auto scale)
- Daily backup 50 times
- 20 deployment slots (staged deployment)
- Traffic manager support
- 32 bit and 64 bit application supported
- Debugger support 5 connections
- SLA 99.95%
- Hybrid Connections up to 200 connections
App Service Plan Tiers usage
Microsoft is advising on how / when you should the different App Service Plan tiers:
- Free -> test and discover the hosting service
- Shared -> basic apps with low traffic and not business critical
- Basic -> dev and test of apps before production
- Standard -> apps in production
- Premium -> large scale apps in production
That’s the recommendation, so that’s still up to you to choose your service tier and that will mostly depend on your budget.
I think SME could make use of Shared and Basic plan as it allows custom domains, and should be enough for few users everyday.
App Service Plan Tiers pricing
Just to give an idea, I will list the monthly price for each Tier and Size for the East US region.
- F1 = Free
- D1 = 9.67 USD/month
- B1 = 55.80 USD/month
- B2 = 111.60 USD/month
- B3 = 223.20 USD/month
- S1 = 74.40 USD/month
- S2 = 148.40 USD/month
- S3 = 297.60 USD/month
- P1 = 223.20 USD/month
- P2 = 446.40 USD/month
- P3 = 892.80 USD/month
As you can see the price is also doubling between Sizes, but there is also quite a gap between Tiers.
Please always refer to the pricing page for actualized and official information as the prices are different per region and change often.
I hope this article could help to understand better the different Tiers in App Service Plan, especially if you are studying for a certification or planning your deployment.
If I’m missing any features, please leave a comment.
