Microsoft Azure App Services is one of the most popular offering from Microsoft Azure. It is a PaaS. There are four kinds of applications created in App services:
Azure App Services is a PaaS offering that has computing resources and runtime environments managed by Microsoft Azure, while the user is only responsible for applications and configurations relating to Web App and High Availability.
The following are some quick points about Azure Web Apps:
- App Services run on virtual machines - virtual machines are managed by Microsoft Azure
- There are five pricing tiers that are available - Free, Shared, Basic, Standard, and Premium
- It supports applications written in Java, ASP.NET, PHP, Node.js, and Python
- We can integrate Apps with Visual Studio or GitHub
- We can create Apps from the Azure portal and also from the command line using Powershell commands; hence, it is easier to automate the creation process
- We can set Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or Deployment using Build and Release of Visual Studio Team Services
- We can configure auto-scaling and make it available across the regions; we can set high availability as well
Let's look at some basic differences between Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Web Apps:
Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines |
Microsoft Azure Web Apps |
|
Offering |
Infrastructure as a Service |
Platform as a Service |
Support |
Support for Linux, Windows Server, SQL Server, Oracle, IBM, and SAP |
Linux and Windows |
Categories |
General Purpose Compute Optimized Memory Optimized GPU High Performance Compute |
Free Share Basic Standard Premium |
Cost |
Per minute billing |
Per minute billing |
Virtual Infrastructure Responsibility |
User |
Microsoft Azure |
Out of the Box support for VSTS |
No |
Yes |
Management Overhead |
Yes |
No |
Installation and Configuration required? |
Yes; the customer is responsible for managing the resources |
Web Apps come with a platform that supports different programming languages; we only need to configure the Application settings |