Developing Solutions for Azure (AZ-204)

Last Updated: 5/1/2024

Examine Azure App Service

  • Azure App Service is an HTTP-based service for hosting web applications, REST APIs, and mobile back ends.
  • You can develop in your favorite programming language or framework.
  • Applications run and scale with ease on both Windows and Linux-based environments.

Built-in auto scale support

  • Aure App Service has the ability to scale up/down or scale out/in depending on the usage of the web app.
  • Scale up/down: Resources include the number of cores or the amount of RAM available.
  • Scaling out/in is the ability to increase, or decrease, the number of machine instances that are running your web app.

Continuous integration/deployment support

  • The Azure portal provides out-of-the-box continuous integration and deployment with
    • Azure DevOps Services,
    • GitHub,
    • Bitbucket,
    • FTP, or
    • a local Git repository on your development machine.
  • Connect your web app with any of the above sources and App Service will do the rest for you by auto-syncing code and any future changes on the code into the web app.

Deployment slots

  • When you deploy your web app you can use a separate deployment slot instead of the default production slot when you're running in the Standard App Service Plan tier or better.
  • Deployment slots are live apps with their own host names.
  • App content and configurations elements can be swapped between two deployment slots, including the production slot.

App Service on Linux

  • App Service can also host web apps natively on Linux for supported application stacks.
  • It can also run custom Linux containers (also known as Web App for Containers).
  • App Service on Linux supports many language specific built-in images. Just deploy your code.
  • Supported languages and frameworks include: Node.js, Java (JRE 8 & JRE 11), PHP, Python, .NET, and Ruby.
  • If the runtime your application requires isn't supported in the built-in images, you can deploy it with a custom container.
  • The languages, and their supported versions, are updated regularly.
  • You can retrieve the current list by using the following command in the Cloud Shell.
az webapp list-runtimes --os-type linux

Limitations

  • App Service on Linux isn't supported on Shared pricing tier.
  • The Azure portal shows only features that currently work for Linux apps. As features are enabled, they're activated on the portal.
  • When deployed to built-in images, your code and content are allocated a storage volume for web content, backed by Azure Storage. The disk latency of this volume is higher and more variable than the latency of the container filesystem.
  • Apps that require heavy read-only access to content files may benefit from the custom container option, which places files in the container filesystem instead of on the content volume.
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