Easily one of my favorite things in Azure are Azure App Services. You might have heard it referred to as Azure Web App, and you’re not wrong. The terminology is pretty much interchangeable.
If you need to host a website or a REST service or an Angular app — pretty much anything that goes on the internet and needs an HTTP endpoint, Azure App Services are your quick any easy solution for hosting. The stuff that I work on tends to be .NET Core and/or Angular but you can host pretty much whichever kind of application you want. Java? PHP? Python? Node? Sure. You can do those, too.
About this Series
This post is part of a series of articles and videos about Azure App Services and ASP.NET Core security. I’ll be publishing new content every couple of days along with videos on YouTube.
Here’s the video that goes along with this article:
What is an Azure App Service?
Azure App Service is an HTTP-based service for hosting web applications, REST APIs, and mobile backends. If you’ve got a web-based, HTTP-based application, you can almost definitely run it in an Azure Web App. It supports a whole bunch of different languages and frameworks like .NET framework, .NET core, Java, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, Python, and more.
You also have the option to run your web app on multiple operating systems, either Windows or Linux. Pretty cool, right?
Why Use Azure App Services?
One of the best things about Azure App Service is its enterprise-quality hosting with minimal effort. It’s packed with features, but you only need to use what you actually need. This means you’ve got room to grow without feeling overwhelmed by having to learn a ton of new stuff.
Your application starts with an HTTPS SSL encrypted site, which is a big plus because setting up SSL HTTP can sometimes be a bit tricky. You’ve got to buy a certificate, install the certificate, deal with DNS things, etc. But with Azure App Service, you start with an encrypted site and it gives you a (mostly) friendly domain name. https://*my-app-service-name*.azurewebsites.net
Features of Azure App Services
Azure App Service comes with a lot of features. You can do custom domains, and there are lots of different scalability options. You can do automatic scaling depending on load, memory usage, CPU usage. You can scale up, you can scale out (more on what that means later).
There’s functionality for automatic backups, and there are integrations with various DevOps pipelines. So you can do CI/CD, continuous integration, continuous deploys. And then there’s a whole bunch of nice stuff for security.
In a nutshell, Azure App Services help you to host your application without worrying about your actual server.
Summary
In short, Azure App Services are fantastic for hosting pretty much anything that uses HTTP.
In the next part of this series, we’ll talk about app services versus app service plans.
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