We will walkthrough on host web application in the Azure websites services. Begin Azure websites by selecting one of the four tier:-
Comparison between different tier:-
Note:-
- Free tier incurs no charges
- Basic and Standard tier offer multiple instance size and scaling.
- Standard tier offer auto scaling and allow you to create staging environment.
- Backup features only available in Standard tier
You can upload custom web application or select from general purpose web application. Custom application support ASP.Net, Node.js, PHP and Python. You can select different version as well that suit your application.
To upload web application, you can use
- Visual Studio
- Visual Studio Online
- Web Matrix
- FTP
- Command Line MSBuild
- Team Foundation Server (TFS)
- Git
During our testing, we use Visual Studio program to publish to Azure website. You are require to download the “publish profile”. Publish Profile includes deployment credential, database connection strings and details for web deploy and FTP deployment.
Example of websites in our test environment:-
- Websites1 – Standard Tier with Staging environment and located in Southeast Asia.
- Websites2 – Free Tier, located in East Asia.
Websites on Staging and Production environment can be swapped.
You can leverage on Traffic Manager to distribute request by
- Performance - provide a rapid response to user requests from a web server close to their physical location.
- Failover – increase availability by providing failover websites that take over in case the primary website has a problem.
- Round Robin – to distribute traffic equally across a set of endpoint
Do take note that you cannot RDP access to the web server. You can use Azure SQL database or SQL server on a virtual machine to host an underlying database. If Azure websites is not suitable to hold your web application, you can setup Virtual Machine in Azure as an alternative.By setting up virtual machine, you will have full control over operating system and infrastructure. However, customer is responsible for system maintenance.
