Hello, and welcome to the introductory article on Microsoft Azure App Services. Azure App Services is a common Azure service offering based on PaaS or Platform as a Service. What is PaaS? Glad you asked!
First, let’s turn to history. Originally, Azure offered its Infrastructure as a Service platform, where you could create virtual machines in the cloud and get rid of the hassle of your own infrastructure. One day, Azure engineers decided to use the same infrastructure that was used to host the virtual machines and create a new service based on that infrastructure.
Basically, they have deployed many IIS clusters around the world and created an API that gives you the ability to deploy web applications in a shared environment without having to manage the infrastructure that hosts the service.
At first it was called Azure Websites, then it was changed to Azure Web Apps, and then several other services were added such as Logic Apps, API Apps, etc. Finally, they decided to combine all of these services into one offering called Azure App Service. Pretty cute, huh?
Create an Azure Application Service
Now that we know what Azure App Service is, let’s move on to creating a new App Service in Azure.
First, we need to log into portal.azure.com with our username and password to access the Azure Dashboard. The Azure Dashboard is the central place where you will manage all of your services related to the Azure platform.
Once there, click on Create Resource, then click on Internet and finally click on Web Application.
You will be greeted with an easy-to-use interface that is mostly self-explanatory, but to get it right, we’ll go over each of the options.
Application name is the name of your application. It must be unique across the Azure platform, which means you can get a red X in case the desired name is already in use.
A subscription is one of your Azure subscriptions that will be used to pay for this service. In my case, this is a Microsoft Azure Enterprise subscription. In your case, it could be Pay-as-you-Go.
In the resource group, we have the ability to choose a new or existing one. We’ll take a closer look at resource groups in the next article, but for now you can leave the default options.
Next, we have an App Service plan. Again, we can choose to get the default app service plan that is generated from the web app with a long confusing name, or we can create our own. I decided to create my own, so I clicked the App Service Plan button.
Then click “Create”.
Choose a meaningful name for your service plan, location, and pricing tier. It is best to choose a location closest to you.
Once that is done, we are back to the original interface and all we have to do is click on “Create”.
That’s all! Deploying your service will take a few minutes. We will then deploy the web application to this service to see how it works.
I hope you enjoyed this introductory article and I hope you read the following to better understand Microsoft Azure. Enjoy!