What is Azure App Service?

Azure App Service is a collection of services that can help software engineers develop applications across mobile, web, API’s and functions.

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App Service allows a developer to focus on developing their application and not about running it and managing the underlying hardware. This is achieved through Azure Service Fabric, a publicly available service that provides the underlying magic for App Service including scaling, availability and redundancy. Focusing on time to value is the new currency when it comes to measuring developer output and App Service is a key service to assist with this!

Top 3 reasons to use Azure App Service

1. Deployment Slots — allow you to stand up a staging environment to test alongside your production environment before swapping the staging environment to your production environment. No more surprises when making changes and the best bit is it’s free!
2. Built in Security — unlike hosting via Virtual Machines where you are responsible for securing the infrastructure, App Service has layered security like multi-factor authentication to access the application built into the platform. It is also worth noting that App Service is also ISO and PCI compliant.
3. Ease of deployment — Utilising Visual Studio, deploying your application to Azure is just a few clicks. You can also deploy your application automatically via GitHub and Azure Pipelines (part of the Azure DevOps service). Azure automatically handles deploying your code to multiple servers and automatically ensures high availability. The other thing to note is it’s particularly fast!

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App Service Plans

An App Service Plan is like a container in which your web applications run; it is used to determine the resources available to your application(s). Comparing this to an on-premises environment or IaaS VM’s, the app service environment is the server(s) on which your application is deployed. The app service plan defines what specification of hardware your app runs on, and how many servers you have.

The Free and Shared plans are different from other plans like Basic and Premium where you are share a VM with other users, so the delineation is on resources rather than virtual machines.

One nice feature with the Basic, Standard and Premium plans is that you only pay per App Service plan. This means you can run multiple applications under it whereas with the Free and shared tiers it is per application (the recommendation here is to use these tiers for development and not production workloads).

Image Courtesy of: docs.microsoft.com

How to get started with Azure App Service

Below are some handy resources to get you started:

• Microsoft Learn — Deploy a website to Azure with Azure App Service
• Microsoft Docs — Azure App Service Overview
• Microsoft Hands on Labs — Modernize .NET apps with Serverless Functions
• Microsoft Learn — Core Cloud Services — Azure compute options

App Service is a game changer. With the ability to allow developers to simply focus on the application, bringing tremendous ROI while also decreasing time to value. For new applications this is the way forward but take time to also review your existing applications as many can make sense!