Azure App Service is an HTTP-based service for hosting web applications, REST APIs, and mobile back ends. You can develop in your favorite language, be it .NET, .NET Core, Java, Node.js, Python, or PHP. Applications run and scale with ease on both Windows and Linux-based environments.

App Service adds the power of Microsoft Azure to your application, including improved security, load balancing, autoscaling, and automated management. Additionally, you can take advantage of its DevOps capabilities, such as continuous deployment from Azure DevOps, GitHub, Docker Hub, and other sources, package management, staging environments, custom domains, and TLS/SSL certificates.

With App Service, you pay for the Azure compute resources you use. The App Service plan that you run your apps on determines the computing resources you use.

Why use App Service?

Azure App Service is a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) offering for developers. Here are some key features of App Service.

Besides App Service, Azure offers other services that can be used for hosting websites and web applications. For most scenarios, App Service is the best choice. For a microservice architecture, consider Azure Kubernetes Service or Service Fabric. If you need more control over the VMs on which your code runs, consider Azure Virtual Machines.

Let host an application on Azure Cloud using Azure Web App Service for better understandability.

We will be creating a MVC application for a start in C#.

MVC application

Name your project and address the preferred location and click next.

Location

Once your project is ready then make minor change in index.view page to make little difference. Run the project on your localhost.

Minor change

Once you are done with your project coding and ready to host then right click on your project and select publish option. If it’s your first instance, then you need to select a publish profile. After that it will be the same selection for every other publish you make until you change to new one.

Publish profile

In here, we are selecting Azure to host my application as shown in below snap.

Azure

Azure provides different services as per your requirement to host your application. We will go with Azure App Service with Window OS and click next.

Requirement

While working with Azure, we need to have subscription which appear automatically once you’ll login using same credential to Visual Studio.

You need to opt for subscription which is either Free or Pay-as-you go for that user’s email id.

Subscription

Select respective subscription you wish to work with and if any web app instance is already created will be appear on dialog to select. We can also create a new instance of it as shown in below snapshot.

Create a new instance

Here, we can name our application URL. Select existing Resource Group or create new one. Select Hosting plan for our application based on its usage. All this component we can also create on Azure portal too which will be appear automatically here based on your selection.

Hosting plan varies as per complexity and requirement need of an application. You can explore different plan here- Azure App Service on Windows pricing.

Hosting plan

Select newly created Web App instance and click finish to start publish.

Web App instance

Cancel

On successful Publish, we can load the given URL to load our application on browser.

URL

Over Azure portal, in App Service section we can see the web app instance created by us with all set configuration.

App Service section

Furthermore we can handle that web app instance in detail by monitoring it at different level. We can apply the Access control, overviewing its performance, manage deployment slot etc.

Manage deployment

Azure Web App as PaaS provides a fine alternate to deploy/host mobile or web app in efficient way on cloud and allow multiple options to handle and mange those resource effortlessly.