Azure App Services Documentation

Your comprehensive guide to building, deploying, and scaling web applications and APIs with Azure App Services.

Azure App Services: An Overview

Azure App Services is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps, mobile backends, and APIs. It offers a robust set of services that enable developers to focus on writing code and accelerating innovation, rather than managing infrastructure.

Azure App Services Architecture Diagram

Conceptual diagram of Azure App Services.

Key Features and Benefits

Unified Platform

App Services supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, including .NET, .NET Core, Java, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, and Python. This flexibility allows development teams to leverage their existing skill sets and technologies.

DevOps Integration

Seamless integration with Azure DevOps, GitHub, and other CI/CD tools simplifies the deployment pipeline. Automated builds, testing, and deployments ensure rapid and reliable release cycles.

Scalability and Performance

App Services offers both manual and automatic scaling options to handle varying workloads. You can scale out (add more instances) or scale up (increase the resources of existing instances) to meet demand.

Security and Compliance

Built-in security features, including managed identities, authentication, authorization, and network restrictions, help protect your applications. App Services also adheres to various industry compliance standards.

Global Availability

Deploy your applications to data centers around the world, ensuring low latency and high availability for your users, wherever they are.

Core Components

App Service Plans

An App Service plan defines a set of compute resources for your web apps to run. The plan determines the location, size, features, cost, and compute resources of the Windows or Linux servers that your app runs on.

Learn more about App Service Plans.

Web Apps, API Apps, Mobile Apps, and Logic Apps

App Services allows you to host different types of applications:

  • Web Apps: For hosting traditional web applications and REST APIs.
  • API Apps: Optimized for building and consuming REST APIs, with built-in support for Swagger and ARM templates.
  • Mobile Apps: Provides a backend for iOS, Android, and Windows mobile applications, including features like authentication, data sync, and push notifications.
  • Logic Apps: A cloud-based service for creating and running automated workflows that integrate apps, data, services, and devices. (While integrated, Logic Apps are a distinct service with their own documentation.)

Common Use Cases

  • Hosting public-facing websites and e-commerce platforms.
  • Building RESTful APIs and microservices.
  • Developing mobile application backends.
  • Running scheduled tasks and background jobs.
  • Creating serverless applications with Azure Functions (often integrated with App Services).

Getting Started with Azure App Services

To start using Azure App Services:

  1. Create an Azure account if you don't have one.
  2. Navigate to the Azure portal and search for "App Services".
  3. Click "Create App Service" and configure your application settings, including the resource group, name, runtime stack, and operating system.
  4. Choose an appropriate App Service Plan based on your performance and cost requirements.
  5. Deploy your application code using one of the supported deployment methods (e.g., Git, FTP, CI/CD pipelines).
Note: It's crucial to select the right App Service Plan tier (Free, Shared, Basic, Standard, Premium, Isolated) to match your application's performance, scalability, and feature needs.

Deployment Best Practices

Leverage deployment slots to test new versions of your application in a production-like environment before swapping them into production. This minimizes downtime and reduces the risk of introducing bugs.

az webapp deployment slot create --name MyWebApp --resource-group MyResourceGroup --slot staging

Conclusion

Azure App Services provides a powerful and flexible platform that significantly reduces the complexity of managing web application infrastructure. By offering a rich set of features, seamless DevOps integration, and robust scalability, it empowers developers to deliver high-quality applications quickly and efficiently.

Explore the rest of this documentation to dive deeper into specific aspects of Azure App Services, such as deployment options, scaling strategies, and security configurations.