In a mobile first, cloud first world, companies need to ensure their customers, partners and employees are able to seamlessly connect with and consume data across anywhere and on any device. As a developer, you need to build applications that support multiple platforms, can integrate with on-premises information systems and cloud-based services as well as automatically scale globally as your business and audience grow. That’s why today, on behalf of the entire Application Platform team, I’m excited to announce Azure App Service.
App Service is a new, one-of-a kind cloud service that enables developers to build web and mobile apps for any platform and any device. App Service is an integrated solution that streamlines development while enabling easy integration with on-premises and SaaS systems while providing the ability to quickly automate business processes.
Unique Integrated Offering
Azure App Service brings together the capabilities from Azure Websites, Azure Mobile Services, and Azure BizTalk Services into a unique integrated offering, while adding powerful new features. App Service includes the following app types:
- Web Apps – Create mission critical Web apps that scale with your business.
- Mobile Apps – Engage employees, partners and customers on any device at any time.
- Logic Apps – Automate business processes across SaaS and on-premises.
- API Apps – Easily build and consume Cloud APIs within any app.
Let’s take a look at each app type in more detail…
Web Apps
Web Apps allow you host any website, web app, and API in the cloud. If you are an existing Azure Websites customer, all of your existing web apps run as-is in App Service with zero changes needed and continue to enjoy the same SLA. You also have access to all of the other app types and features at no additional cost. Your existing web hosting plan, now the app hosting plan, is able to also run mobile, logic and api apps at the exact same price!
Web Apps provide a robust set of developer centric capabilities such as support for multiple languages and frameworks (.NET, Java, PHP, NodeJS, Python, and more), Continuous Integration and cloud debugging. Web Apps empower enterprises through specific capabilities like hybrid connectivity and Active Directory integration while making sure compliance, auditing and data retention requirements are met. Web Apps can auto-scale to meet any needs, and offer high-availability through deployment in several geo-locations with Azure Traffic Manager.
Mobile Apps
Mobile Apps offer a mobile application development platform with a rich set of capabilities. Based on Azure Mobile Services, Mobile Apps provide developers with a comprehensive set of client SDKs including Windows, iOS and Android as well as multi-platform environments such as Xamarin and Cordova. With Mobile Apps, you can easily send push notifications to your app, add login, and store data in the cloud with offline sync to any mobile client.
With App Service, Mobile Apps gain a host of new features such as staging slots for deployment, WebJobs, traffic manager support, better scale options, and more.
Logic Apps
Logic Apps allow any developer or technical user to automate business process execution, all via an easy to use visual designer. Accompanied by a comprehensive marketplace of API App connectors, Logic Apps can integrate your data and services from your SaaS apps like SalesForce, DropBox and Office 365 to your favorite Azure PaaS Services and others from the likes of Twilio and Twitter.
Logic Apps connectivity is built on the foundation of API apps, meaning you can easily bring your own services and functionality to the party. And for enterprise-grade integration needs our connector library includes capabilities from Microsoft Azure’s integration platform, BizTalk Services; including built-in API apps for message validation, transformation, a rules engine, trading partner management and hybrid connectivity, all built-in.
API Apps
API Apps allow any technical user or developer to discover, host and manage API’s and SaaS connectors in the cloud. With API Apps, developers can select from a rich library of existing on-premises and cloud APIs as well as contribute their own APIs easily for public or private use by Logic, Web, and Mobile apps in Azure App Service.
API Apps provide versioning capabilities for you APIs making it easy to manage new versions and automatically update the applications that use them in real time without downtime. APIs can be consumed in a variety of programming languages with tooling that generates SDKs in all the languages supported in App Service (.NET, Node.js, Java, PHP and Python). Determine who can access APIs with simple controls to require authenticated users, public users or just other apps inside App Service. Protect APIs with enterprise grade security using Active Directory including single sign on and social identity using Google, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft accounts. Consume third party services with built in support for OAuth and a secure token store to store access credentials with no coding. API Apps provide a tightly integrated development experience ranging from the VS IDE to the cloud with tools like cloud debugging, live tracing and Testing in Production (TiP).
Developer Agility
Azure App Service is backed by a common development, management and billing model that’s easy to understand, allowing you to rapidly develop, deploy and scale powerful web and mobile apps.
With App Service, developers enjoy the following benefits:
- Deploy web, mobile and API apps in seconds using your language of choice like .NET, Java, NodeJS, PHP or Python
- Build one app backend that works across native iOS, Android and Windows clients
- Automate business processes using a powerful new visual design experience
- Connect easily to enterprise systems such as SQL, SAP and Oracle and popular cloud services like Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Salesforce.com, DropBox and many more
- Build and consume cloud APIs from a rich ecosystem of connectors and templates
- Perform sophisticated DevOps functions with continuous integration using Visual Studio Online and GitHub
- Focus on rapidly improving your apps without worrying about infrastructure
Powerful App Platform
With App Service, you can host any number of app types on a single App Service plan, and pay just one low price. App Service provides an enterprise-ready platform backed by Microsoft’s 25 years of experience building reliable and scalable enterprise application environments for SLAs that your business demands. Here is a brief summary of a few of the benefits the App Service platform offers to Microsoft customers:
- Fully managed infrastructure with auto patching
- Secure cloud platform that is ISO, SOC2, and PIC compliant
- Built-in staging, backup, roll-back, and testing-in-production capabilities
- Built-in Auto scale, load balancing, and performance monitoring
- High availability with geo-distributed deployments
- Access to on premises data with VPN and Hybrid Connections
- Delegated and role-based administration of cloud apps and their resources
- New, more robust Premium (preview) service tier supporting even more scale and extended functionality
Get Started Now!
App Service is generally available starting today, with the Mobile, Logic, and API app types still in public preview.
App Service pricing is the same as existing Azure Websites pricing, offering new capabilities from Mobile, Logic, and API apps at no extra cost. And for a limited time, you can also enjoy our new Premium tier preview at existing Websites Standard tier pricing.
Want a taste? Get going in seconds. Create a new app right away for free. No credit card required, no commitments, no hassles.
Additional Resources
- Watch the online broadcast of App Service launch event and demo
- Sign up for a free Azure trial