Creating the Azure App Service

In this guest post by Kamil Mrzygłód, a software developer, architect, and Microsoft Azure MVP, you will learn how to create the Azure App Service. You will see how to create the Azure App Service using the Azure Portal and Visual Studio. Each method can be easier or harder, depending on your current needs and the specification of your application. However, the strength of a cloud and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering lies in the straightforward and intuitive process of provisioning new components of your system.

Creating Azure App Service using the Azure Portal

To begin with App Service, I will show you how you can create your very first web app using the Azure Portal. In fact, all you need is your mouse and keyboard (because each application has to have a name)—neither external hardware nor detailed configuration information is required here, because Azure will do everything for you.

Selecting Azure Web App from available services

To create Azure App Service in the Azure Portal, you first have to find it in the list of available services. The easiest way to do so is to click on + Create a resource button and search for Web App:

Note
Instead of using the + Create a resource button, you can click on App Services—it will forward you to a different view, where you can create an App Service by clicking on the + Add button. This is true for all of the most popular Azure services, such as SQL databases, virtual machines, and storage accounts.

As you can see, the Azure Portal tries to help you find the service most relevant to the search string. When you click on the Web App item, you will see another screen containing multiple similar items, all related in some way to the one you are searching for:

For the purpose of this exercise, select Web App, and then click on the Create button at the right bottom of the screen.

Note
In the beginning, it is always easier to select the most generic option when it comes to choosing a service. When you gain more experience and become more familiar with available services, you will see that Azure offers many useful preconfigured setups (such as an integrated Web App and SQL database), which can be used to shorten development and configure all services in one place.

Configuring an Azure web app

When you click on the Create button, you will see a screen where you can enter all the information needed to create a web app. All required fields are marked using an * (asterisk) symbol:

As you can see, when creating a web app, we have to fill almost all fields (with a little exception regarding the Application Insights radio button, which we will cover in the next chapters). Let's focus on each field separately, so we have a better understanding of how they work:

• App name: This field represents the domain name of your application. It is important to select both a unique and valid name, as it cannot be changed later on. Please note that you can easily attach your own custom domain if needed.
• Subscription: If you have access to more than one subscription, you will be given an opportunity to select the right one for this particular resource. Thanks to that, you will be able to differentiate the cost between, for example, different projects.
• Resource Group: In Azure, each resource has to be a part of a logic container, called a resource group. This does not imply any additional cost by itself, so you do not have to worry about creating multiple resource groups.
• OS: Currently in Azure, you can create a web app using the different operating systems of Windows, Linux, or Docker containers. This choice can impact both cost and performance, so make sure you have chosen the right operating system for your needs.
• App Service plan/Location: App Services in Azure are directly linked to App Service Plans, which provide different features and performance depending on the option you choose.

Note
It is always a good practice to leverage resource groups and separate your resources using a specific filter, such as the lifetime of resources, or the given environment (that is, production, staging, or testing). Resource groups gives you better control over deployed services and allows for more granular control over who can access a resource.

Since you are just starting with Azure, you probably do not have any App Service Plans created. As we cannot create an App Service without an App Service Plan, we will sort this now.

Creating an App Service Plan

When you click on App Service plan/Location, you will see a screen with the + Create new button, allowing for the creation of a new App Service Plan. It should look like this:

As you can see, we have to enter three fields:
• App Service plan: This is the name of your App Service Plan, which has to be unique within a resource group.
• Location: Thanks to this setting, we can locate our App Service Plan in a specific region. This sometimes implies different features are available.
• Pricing tier: When you click on this item, you will see another screen presenting available features for different available tiers. This choice is really important feature-wise, and will depend in most cases on the environmental characteristics you are planning (such as Dev / Test environments, Production applications, whether you need deployment slots or not, and so on):

As you can see in the preceding screenshot, we have three categories of App Service Plans:
• Dev / Test: This one contains F, D, and B tiers (which stand for free, shared, and basic). They are designed for simple dev/test scenarios and lightweight web applications that do not need features such as autoscaling or backups.
• Production: This offers powerful machines and advanced features that are useful in many realistic scenarios, such as APIs, e-commerce, and popular portals.
• Isolated: This uses the same hardware as the Production tier, but with even more features and possibilities to isolate your web apps from external access. This is the most expensive category, but can be helpful when creating systems that cannot be made available publicly.

Note
It is important to remember that tiers F and D have a limited amount of computing time per day. That means that once you exceed the limit (60 minutes for the F tier, and 240 minutes for the D tier) of your processing time, your application will become unavailable and be suspended until the next day.

For the purpose of this exercise, I would recommend selecting any tier from the Dev / Test category. Once you are satisfied with the option you've selected, you can click the Apply button. My configuration, for example, looks like this:

Note
Remember that you can always upgrade (or scale up) the instance of your App Service Plan, for example, when you need a specific feature or the popularity of your application has grown. This is one of the biggest advantages of cloud over on-premises, where you would have to buy and set up new machines on your own.

Now, you can click OK, and you will return to the Web App blade, where you can enter missing fields. Here, you can see the whole configuration of my web app:

Now the only thing left is to click on the Create button and wait several seconds for the creation of a new resource. During this time, Azure will validate the template and parameters, and orchestrate multiple underlying controllers to create a service. Once a new resource is created, you should see a notification and be able to see in your resources. To quickly validate this, click on the All resources button on the left and filter all of them using, for example, the name of the App Service you have created:

Creating an Azure App Service using Visual Studio

If you do not want to create your web apps using the Azure Portal, you can use Microsoft Visual Studio, which has built-in integration for many different Azure services.

Note
This exercise was created using Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 (15.6.4) with Azure workloads installed. If you want to configure your instance and ensure everything is set up correctly, please follow the short tutorial available at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/azure/dotnet-tools?view=azure-dotnet&tabs=windows.

In Visual Studio, click on File | New Project. This will display a New Project window, where you can find plenty of different templates for starting with a new application. Because we are interested in cloud projects, let's start with the Cloud category:

Since we are working with App Services in this chapter, the template we are interested in is ASP.NET Web Application (.NET Framework). The other valid option here is also ASP.NET Core Web Application—feel free to use it if you feel confident enough to work with the latest .NET releases, as we will cover both scenarios. When you are satisfied with your choice, click OK.

The next step is the selection of the proper template. Here, you have multiple options, such as the following:
• Empty: The most simple option, which lets you have full control over installed packages and overall structure
• Web Forms: The oldest available framework for building web applications, using many built-in controls with data access
• MVC: A well-known model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, which took the place of Web Forms
• Web API: A template for creating RESTful HTTP services using the .NET programming stack
• Single Page Application: This template comes with plenty of additional tools for building client-side interactions

All the preceding options should be more or less familiar to you. However, thanks to installing the Azure toolset, you should have access to two additional templates:
• Azure API App: This offers additional integrations with different Azure services such as Azure AD, API Management, and Logic apps
• Azure Mobile App: A template for building mobile backends
However, we will cover those two in the next sections of this chapter. For now, to proceed, let's select MVC, as this is the most common and simplest of all templates listed here. Use the default options for this template and click OK.

Note
You have probably noticed an additional button, which I have not described, Change Authentication. It allows for selecting the method used for authenticating access to your web application. We will cover that feature in the section describing the security of web apps in Azure.

After several seconds, Visual Studio should generate a project based on the selected template. I believe it should look familiar to you, as it is not that different to a traditional web application created from an MVC template. I am sure you cannot wait to see whether it works—do not wait any longer, and press F5 to start the application.

You should see a screen similar to mine:

As you can see, it is the same generic template that you would see when starting with a traditional project. The question is, how can we deploy it to Azure to have our website working in the cloud?

Let's stop our website running locally and go back to Visual Studio for a moment. When you right-click on a project icon, you will see a context menu. There, between multiple different options, you can click on Publish...:

Since this is a cloud project, you will see additional options besides IIS, FTP, and Folder:
• App Service: This is for deploying your application to a PaaS service
• Azure Virtual Machines: This is for deploying your application to a virtual machine that you have configured

Note
Because the topic of this book is PaaS services, we will not cover deploying a web app to a virtual machine. However, if you are interested in doing so, proper instructions are available at https://github.com/aspnet/Tooling/blob/AspNetVMs/docs/create-asp-net-vm-with-webdeploy.md.

For now, let's select App Service. You should see two different options:
• Create new: For deploying an application to a freshly created App Service
• Select existing: This option is only useful if you have already deployed your site

Because we are just starting, the option we are interested in is Create new. After clicking on Publish..., you will see another screen, where you can enter all the required parameters. If you read the previous section about creating an App Service using the Azure Portal, some fields should look familiar—in fact, you are doing the very same thing as you would do in the portal. If you skipped this section, I strongly recommend that you go back and read the descriptions. After configuring my web app, my screen looks like this:

Note
Remember that you can create both resource groups and App Service Plans directly from the preceding screen. If you do not like the options listed there, you can click on the New... button, which will guide you through the process of creating a new resource. This is another advantage of tools such as Visual Studio, as you do not have to leave your programming environment to work with Azure.

If you are satisfied with the current configuration, the last thing left is to click on the Create button and wait a moment for the application deployment to complete. Additionally, Visual Studio will prepare a publish profile that you can reuse whenever you want to. We will have a look at it, as it will help us in the next section of this chapter. Once deployment is completed, you should see your web application open automatically in your default browser:

Congratulations! You have just created and deployed your very first App Service. If you take a look at the URL, you'll see that it contains the name you set in the Visual Studio wizard. All web apps in Azure can be accessed using the following URL format:

http(s): //{appservicename}.azurewebsites.net

This also explains why a name has to be unique: since, by default, all web applications hosted as Azure Web Apps are available publicly, you have to select a name that is not already in use in another URL. In the next section, we will try to use FTP to deploy our application, as an alternative to using Visual Studio.

That’s it! If you want to learn more about Azure, you must check out Hands-On Azure for Developers. While most guides tend to describe Microsoft Azure on a more generic level, focusing on the general overview of components, Hands-On Azure for Developers will give you an in-depth understanding of both how this particular cloud works and what the best solutions for different scenarios are.