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What the heck is an Azure App Service?

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TLDR: A place where you can deploy and run your web-app. Of course there is a ton of things one can configure but that’s the main reason why App Service exists. Azure will give you some space, where you upload your web-application files, and a public url where your application can be reached. There is a free tier available, so you can experiment all you want without paying a penny!

What’s so cool with it?

Well, many things, to name a few:

  1. You can deploy directly from Visual Studio. You can have your app up & running in less than a minute. It goes without saying that pipeline deploys are also fully supported.
  2. You can chose Windows or Linux OS and shared ($) or isolated ($$$) host.
  3. In my eyes, it really is a value for money choice. You get some space on a Linux machine, with 1 vCore, 1.75GB RAM & 10GB of storage space for less than 15$/month.
  4. Fully integrated with Application Insights where you can monitor everything.
  5. You can avoid the cold starts by turning on the Always On-flag.
  6. You can deploy containerized apps. Personally, I always try to exhaust the App Service option, before starting to think about Kubernetes.
  7. Scalable to infinity. Your app will go full Goliath-mode if needed, and will return to David-mode when the dust settles.

What’s the catch?

  1. Not really a disadvantage, but if your high traffic comes & goes, and you don’t have the need to be stateful forever, then you can get by much cheaper with Azure Functions.
  2. Smart scaling apps like KEDA is not available for App Services. I would like to be able to scale proactively and not only rely on CPU & Memory exhaustion.
  3. The cool staging-environment feature is only available in the (slightly) more expensive plans Standard, Premium, or Isolated.

Verdict

It is my go to for development-purposes. They are light, easy and most importantly FREE, until you need to do serious stuff. However, like everything else, App Services is not a Swiss knife and not the suitable solution for every scenario. The fact that you can do most things with App Services, doesn’t mean that you should. I would use an App Service for a stateful web-application, but I would definitely prefer an Azure Function for a simple stateless Restful API.

Disclaimer 1: URLs last checked 2022-10-27. Drop me a line if you find a broken link please.

Disclaimer 2: It’s never my intention to create a parallel wiki, I try to write my own experiences and the way I see things, not copy official documentation or Stack Overflow.

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