Understanding App Service In Azure

Introduction

This article will cover the following things:

• Brief Concepts and Pre-requisites
• Implementation – Create App-services in Microsoft Azure using VS
• Implementation – Create web-application and deploy application to the Azure

Brief Concepts and Pre-requisites

What is Windows Azure App Service?

• It is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) version of Microsoft Azure.
• It helps us to create web or mobile app for any platform or device.
• As a single integrated service, it lets you combine multiple components, websites, mobile app back ends, and API into a single solution.

Why App Service?

• Support for multiple languages and frameworks – It has full support for .NET, Node.js, Java, PHP, and Python based applications.
• IDE integration - Dedicated tools in Visual Studio help to create, deploy and debug.
• Continuous integration - Set up continuous integration and deployment with Visual Studio Team Services, GitHub, or Bitbucket.
• Scaling is easy - Scale up or down manually or automatically. Host your apps anywhere in Microsoft's global datacenter infrastructure.
• Extensive application templates - Choose from an extensive list of templates in the Azure Marketplace that let you use a wizard to install popular open-source software such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

Types of App Service?

• Web Apps - For hosting websites and web applications.
• Mobile Apps - For hosting mobile app back ends.
• Logic Apps - For automating business processes and integrating systems and data across clouds. 
• API Apps - For Hosting Web APIs.

Pre-requisites

Read the following article to create azure account and for some basic information about Azure to get started.

Implementation

Create App-services in Microsoft Azure using VS.

Steps to be followed:

• Open VS 2017 and click on the Server Explorer from the View Tab
  
  

• Then Right click on the Azure and click on the “Connect to Azure Subscription,” after that we will be able to see all the items which are present on the azure portal in VS only.
  
  

• Right-click on the App Service and then create App-service followed by changing the name of the app-service to “app-service-08-05-2017” then change resource group name to “resource-group-08-05-2017” and choose the existing service plan from there.
  
  

• Click on the Create button and then wait a few moments for this to be created and then go into the AppServices tab under Azure.
  
  

Implementation – Create web-application and deploy application on the Azure.

Steps to be followed:

• Create a new project in VS 2017 named as “web-app-08-05-2017”
  
  

• Then choose empty template with MVC option checked there.
  
  

• Create a Home Controller in the Controllers folder.
  
  

• Create a View named Index and write the sample code in a .cshtml file. e.g. “web app created on 08-05-2017."
  
  

• Right-click on the project and click on publish then select the existing app-service and click on the OK button to get it deployed on the cloud.
  
  

• Run the application after that with the following URL and see the result – http://app-service-08-05-2017.azurewebsites.net
  
  

Please find the attached zip file for project reference. (Restore packages first and then build the project before running it), happy learning!