Azure

Hosting web apps and APIs on Azure App Service

Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform, and the material gathered here concentrates on App Service, a managed offer for creating, releasing and growing web apps, mobile back ends and APIs. Microsoft says more than two million apps and sites run on it and that it handles over sixty billion requests a day.

Languages and frameworks

Teams can bring code written in .NET, .NET Core, Node.js, Java, Python, PHP or Ruby, and run it in containers or directly on Windows or Linux. The service can also run on Kubernetes across Azure, on-premises and any CNCF-conformant cluster through Azure Arc. Integration with Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio is meant to raise developer productivity.

Delivery and operations

Servers are patched, maintained and scaled by Microsoft, so a team does not have to operate them itself. Built-in continuous integration and delivery connects with Git, GitHub, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, Docker Hub and Azure Container Registry. Deployment slots reduce downtime and risk when an app is updated, and zero-downtime deployments are part of the design. Microsoft quotes an uptime guarantee of 99.95 percent backed by a service-level agreement.

Security and networking

A web application firewall can shield apps, and virtual network integration keeps connections private. An isolated, dedicated App Service Environment gives single-tenant app instances, and version 3 of that environment can enforce network access control outside the applications. Azure Active Directory and other well-known identity providers handle sign-in and permissions. Microsoft states that the platform meets standards such as SOC and PCI and that it works in Azure Government and on-premises as well as in the public cloud, with scaling across all Azure regions.

Monitoring and next steps

App Service diagnostics supports live troubleshooting, while Azure Monitor and Application Insights show performance, health, throughput, response time, dependencies and error trends, with alerts for unexpected conditions. Microsoft also offers training and a migration assistant for moving .NET web apps to Azure, and points to Cognitive Services for text reading and speech translation.