Build: Azure App Services has a growth spurt

At Build there was a number of huge announcements. It is amazing to see that Azure is keeping up the pace, and as a developer I am excited about the promise of services that will enable me to focus on implementing solutions rather than fiddeling with servers and infrastructure.

On a scale from IaaS to PaaS, one service that I look forward to see evolve on the far right (PaaS) of the spectrum is the artist formerly known as Azure websites. Earlier this year it was announced that Azure Websites will be part of Azure App Services along with the Mobile, API and Logic services. It now turnes out this was just the first step in making these services much more powerfull.

App Service Environments have just been announced, which is a level of configuration for a number of App Service Plans which in turn is a level of configuration for App Service Apps. An App Service Environment can have up to 3 worker pools and a number of VM's rangeing from Small and up to the newly announced Extra large. An App Service Environment i joined to a Virtual Network and subnet, either one you create from scratch or possibly an existing one that you have today. This will allow the services to communicate securely with other backend services like SQL Server or Active Directory. When a new environment is created through the portal it will default to making 1 Virtual Network, 2 frontend and 2 small workers and 1 IP address - and then you can scale from there. The App Service Plan configuration level is a sublevel where you specify which resources in the overall Environment a set of Apps should run on.

Azure Service Environments will work as a scale unit to a single user, and provide insulation from noise neighbour effects, empowering much better scaling and security options. This includes:

- Up to 50 total compute resources
- The new Extra Large VM size
- Unlimited deployment slots
- Backup options
- 500GB of file storage

All in all this is a massive lift for Azure App Services, and removes a number of limitations that previously made it necessary to go with a VM, and in turn getting you back in maintenance mode. So this is one of the announcements I have been looking forward to writing and talking about, simply because it is a big step toward developer nirvana, of focusing on development, with all the power you want, but without worrying about maintenance.