App Service - Microsoft Azure Web Apps

App Service is one of the most popular offering from Microsoft Azure. It is a PaaS. There are four kinds of applications that are created in App Service:

In this book, our focus is on Web Apps. Web Apps are a PaaS offering that have computing resources and runtime environments managed by Microsoft Azure while the user is only responsible for the application and configurations related to Web Apps and high availability.
The following are some quick points about Azure Web Apps:

• Web Apps runs on virtual machines – virtual machines are managed by Microsoft Azure
• Five pricing tiers are available – Free, Shared, Basic, Standard, and Premium
• Web Apps support applications written in Java, ASP.NET, PHP, Node.js, and Python
• We can integrate Web Apps with Visual Studio or GitHub
• We can create Web Apps from the Azure portal and also from the command line using PowerShell commands; thus it is easier to automate the creation process
• We can set CI and CD or deployment using Build and Release of VSTS
• We can configure autoscaling and make it available across the regions; we can set high availability as well

Let's see some basic difference between Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Web Apps:

To have a quick hands on, follow these steps:

1. Go to https://tryappservice.azure.com. Select Web App:

1. Select a template, in our case it is a Java template. Click on Create:

1. The web app is ready. Note the URL given to access it:

1. Visit the web app at a given URL:

This is how we can create a sample Azure web app.