Azure Web Apps was the name for a

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

based platform for hosting websites, created and operated by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

. It is a platform as a service (PaaS) which allows publishing Web apps running on multiple frameworks and written in different programming languages (

.NET The .NET platform (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a free and open-source, managed code, managed computer software framework for Microsoft Windows, Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. The project is mainly developed by Microsoft emplo ...

, node.js, PHP, Python and

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

), including Microsoft proprietary ones and 3rd party ones. Microsoft Azure Web Sites became available in its first preview version in June 2012, and an official version ("General Availability") was announced in June 2013. Microsoft Azure Web Sites was originally named Windows Azure Web Sites, but was renamed as part of a re-branding move across Azure in March 2014. It was subsequently renamed "App Services" in March 2015.

History

Microsoft initially offered a basic web hosting service as part of Office Live Small Business, which was launched in late 2007. Office Live Small Business offered customers free and commercial web hosting with a built-in system for creating websites based on built-in templates and a site creation wizard. When Microsoft started allocating resources into developing its numerous cloud solutions, a group was formed in

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, or just Azure ( /ˈæʒər, ˈeɪʒər/ ''AZH-ər, AY-zhər'', UK also /ˈæzjʊər, ˈeɪzjʊər/ ''AZ-ure, AY-zure''), is the cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft. It has management, access and development of ...

to develop Microsoft Azure Web Sites. Microsoft Azure Web Sites was announced in June 2012 as a preview release. In parallel, Microsoft developed Microsoft Azure Pack, which offers the same technology that can be installed as a private-cloud on sets of servers at a customer's site and under direct customer control. In mid-2013, both Microsoft Azure Web Sites and Microsoft Azure Pack were officially released to the public.

Features

Microsoft Azure Web Sites is a web-hosting platform that supports multiple technologies, and programming languages (

, node.js, PHP, Python). Users with

subscriptions can create

Websites A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, education ...

, and deploy content and code into the Web sites. Microsoft Azure Web Sites supports a website creation wizard which allows the user to create a blank site, or create a site based on one of several available pre-configured images from the website gallery. As part of creating the website, the site's

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

is assigned a subdomain of azurewebsites.net. In various for-pay tiers, a website can be assigned one or more custom domains. This is implemented by setting a CNAME record on the DNS server that hosts the user's domain's zone to point at the user's web site hosted in Azure. On some for-pay tiers, the user has the added option of uploading an SSL certificate and configuring the site to be bound to

HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It uses encryption for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protoc ...

. Once a site has been created, the user can add or modify its content using multiple deployment methods, including Web Deploy (MSDeploy), TFS (via

Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including web site, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development ...

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

FTPS FTPS (also known as FTP-SSL and FTP Secure) is an extension to the commonly used File Transfer Protocol (FTP) that adds support for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and, formerly, the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL, which is now prohibited by RFC756 ...

WebMatrix Microsoft WebMatrix is a discontinued cloud-connected website builder and HTML editor for Windows, geared towards web development. WebMatrix enables developers to build websites using built-in templates or popular open-source applications, with fu ...

, CodePlex,

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

Dropbox Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropbox w ...

, Bitbucket, Mercurial and local Git. Other features of Azure Web Sites are: * User-selected placement in one or multiple data centers across the globe. * Uptime SLA of 99.95% for Standard tier customers. * Continuous monitoring of site metrics such as CPU time, Data in, Data out, HTTP errors and additional metrics. * Setting of monitoring alerts. * Log collection and failed request tracing for tracking and troubleshooting. * Deployment of a Microsoft SQL or MySQL database to be used with web applications. * Websites are hosted on IIS 8.0 running on a custom version of Windows Server 2012. * Support for 4 service tiers: Free, Shared, Basic and Standard (dedicated). * In the Basic and Standard tiers, support for 3 VM sizes for scaling up. * In the for-pay tiers, support for manual or automatic scaling-out with up to 10 instances of VMs. * Support for integration with Azure Traffic Manager to route traffic manually or automatically between websites in different regions across the globe. * Authentication using Microsoft Azure Active Directory

Implementation

Microsoft Azure Web Sites is implemented as websites that are dynamically created on-demand on servers running Windows Server 2012 and IIS 8.0. When a client posts a request to a web site, Microsoft Azure Web Sites dynamically provisions the site on one of the Azure

virtual machines In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

pointing it at content stored in Azure Storage containers. The Azure Virtual Machines are deployed in groups called "Stamps", which may contain hundreds of such machines. Microsoft deploys these stamps in its Azure data centers across the world, and adds more stamps as demand grows.

Tiers

Azure Web Sites services are offered in 4 tiers. The entry-level tier is the "free" tier. The free tier supports up to 10 websites with 1 GB of content storage, and is limited to 165 MB of daily data egress. The first for-pay tier is the "Shared" tier. Shared tier sites support custom domains and can be scaled out to up to 6 instances. The current highest for-pay tier is the "Standard" tier. Standard tier websites run on VMs dedicated exclusively to a single customer's websites. The Standard tier supports SSL (both SNI and IP-based), scaling out to up to 10 instances, and file storage of up to 50 GB of content. Basic and Standard tier websites can be deployed on 3 sizes of virtual machines: Small VMs with 1 virtual CPU and 1.75GB of RAM, Medium VMs with 2 virtual CPUs and 3.5 GB of RAM, and Large VMs with 4 virtual CPUs and 7GB of available RAM.

Data centers

Microsoft operates Microsoft Azure in a number of data centers throughout the world with Microsoft Azure Web Sites available in a subset of these. When deploying websites on Microsoft Azure Web Sites customers can choose to deploy sites in a data center in any of the following geographical regions: East US, North central US, West US, East Asia, Brazil South, North Europe, West Europe, Japan East or Japan West.

References

External links

;Microsoft
Microsoft Azure Web Sites Service Home Page

Microsoft Azure Web Sites Documentation Home Page

Microsoft Azure Service Dashboard with Current Availability Status

"Introducing Microsoft Azure", David Chappell, Chappell & Associates

''Microsoft Azure Web Sites'', James Chambers, Wrox

''Microsoft Azure Web Sites: Building Websites at a Rapid Pace'', Tejaswi Redkar, Dynamic Deploy
;Other
Microsoft makes Microsoft Azure services generally available, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft starts making more of its Azure cloud services generally available, Mary Jo Foley
{{Microsoft Internet properties established in 2013 Cloud computing providers Microsoft cloud services