From the course: Azure Essential Training for Developers

What is an Azure App Service? - Azure Tutorial

From the course: Azure Essential Training for Developers

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What is an Azure App Service?

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- An Azure App Service is an H-T-T-P based service that allows you to build and host web applications, mobile backends, and RESTful APIs. Azure App Service has support for .NET, .NET Core, Node JS, Python, Ruby, Java, and PHP, so there's a high likelihood that you can develop in your favorite language. You can also run PowerShell scripts or other executables as background services. This is great for handling legacy applications or parts of your app that can't be migrated to Azure App Service immediately, and once you're ready to deploy you can do so on either Windows or Linux environments. By building and hosting your applications with Azure App Service you can take advantage of so many services within Azure to make them better. One of the best services to use with your Azure App Service is Azure DevOps. From your commits, using whichever source control platform you prefer, all the way to deployment, Azure DevOps can fully automate your continuous integration and continuous delivery processes. Using Azure DevOps also allows you to set up multiple environments like Dev, QA, and Staging, which can be used to promote features and fixes through a validated process. If security and compliance are concerns for your application which we all know can be quite cumbersome then don't worry. Azure App Services are conformed to ICO, SOC and PCI standards by default. You can also setup IP restrictions, configure subdomains, or create blacklists and whitelists, among other compliance focused requirements. And as an extra convenience Azure App Services integrates natively with Azure Active Directory so you don't have to re-write any authentication mechanisms from scratch. When hosting your apps with Azure App Services you can manage scale through the Azure CLI or the Azure portal. You can scale up or out, depending on your needs. Scale up to increase your CPU usage, memory, or disk space. This is great for enhancing your existing infrastructure. I like to think of scaling up as replacing, say, an older GeForce GTX 1080 with the latest graphics card. By scaling up I can now play my favorite game on ultra high video settings without the game stuttering or crashing and by scaling up your application it can handle higher loads and result in a better, faster experience for your users. Scaling out, on the other hand increases the number of instances we have to work with. So instead of replacing our existing graphics card with a better one, in this strategy we combine multiple lower end graphics cards to work together to help us play our game at an acceptable rate. This strategy is common in big data processing where multiple machines are linked together to collectively provide processing power. Depending on your pricing tier you can scale out anywhere from 20 instances to 100 instances. You can even do so automatically using pre-defined rules that you set up. If you're lucky enough to work on the Greenfield, Azure App Services also makes it simple to create new applications. Azure has a vast library of quick start templates. Using one of those templates you can literally create and deploy a web app, an Azure function, a REST API, or one of many other common applications with a single click. This is my favorite part about using Azure App Services as it allows me to get up and running quickly, especially when I'm prototyping or experimenting with new features. As developers Azure App Services helps us offload the management scaling and monitoring of the applications we build. Which means we can focus more on the code. That's all we really want, right? Next I'll show you how to get started with Azure App Service by building a simple API.

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