Running in the cloud opens up a world of capabilities for your application. Things that once took a lot of effort to achieve are now a mouse click away. In this chapter, I want to highlight a few of the services you can use to make your application better–better for your users, who want the best performance they can get, and better for you as a developer, who needs to develop the application, deploy it, and monitor its behavior.

To enhance your application, you will now learn how to enable elasticity to scale based on demand or on prior knowledge of events. You will also connect your application to Application Insights, which runs in the cloud and collects metrics that you can later use to diagnose problems and analyze your application's behavior. Finally, you'll learn how to test your application like the cloud giants, and how to run multiple versions of your app side by side in production using Azure Deployment slots.

Here are the topics you'll learn about in this chapter:

• Scaling your service
• Cloud diagnostics with Application Insights
• Testing in production with Deployment slots