TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Azure App Service

Score8.4 out of 10

194 Reviews and Ratings

What is Azure App Service?

The Microsoft Azure App Service is a PaaS that enables users to build, deploy, and scale web apps and APIs, a fully managed service with built-in infrastructure maintenance, security patching, and scaling. Includes Azure Web Apps, Azure Mobile Apps, Azure API Apps, allowing developers to use popular frameworks including .NET, .NET Core, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, and Ruby.

Top Performing Features

  • Platform access control

    Rules controlling what data different user categories can access

    Category average: 7.8

  • Ease of building user interfaces

    Ability to build flexible user interfaces using drag-and-drop tools

    Category average: 7.9

  • Platform management overhead

    Resources required to keep platform up and running

    Category average: 7.6

Areas for Improvement

  • Development environment replication

    Ease of replicating new development environments

    Category average: 7.8

  • Upgrades and platform fixes

    Ease of deployment of major upgrades or problem fixes

    Category average: 7.7

  • Issue recovery

    Ease of recovery from problem state

    Category average: 7.1

Azure App Service - The best fast and reliable place for your deployment related needs.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Coming from a background of manual deployment using the CD drive and USB to deployment using AWS tools like CodeDeploy, we primarily use Azure App Service to prepare our servers to run automated tests and ensure the same configuration is deployed across all prod and non-prod servers. At a high level, we can achieve greater consistency, reliability, faster releases, and lower manpower overhead.

Pros

  • Easy, simple deployment and less overhead.
  • Consistency and reliability.
  • Faster feedback through CI/CD and diagnostics.

Cons

  • Deployment failures details can be improved.
  • Performance testing and runtime testing support can be improved.
  • on scaling to larger setups, gets difficult to track and audit.

Return on Investment

  • Faster time to market - positive impact.
  • less overhead and more productivity - positive impact.
  • Less scope of complex testing scenarios - less positive impact.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

AWS CodeDeploy

Other Software Used

Azure DevOps, Azure API Management, Azure Application Gateway

Losing Market share fast.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We discontinued the use of the Azure App. Microsoft is behind in its AI integration. Google took the spot with the new Gemini integration, and we replaced Azure with the Google suite. So, no, I wouldn't recommend it for anyone anymore. There are better solutions for app deployment around, and Microsoft is dropping the ball.

Pros

  • Windows app development.
  • Windows app integration.
  • Windows machines integration.

Cons

  • AI integration.
  • AI development.
  • AI tools.

Return on Investment

  • It was great to build apps for Microsoft based applications and connect them.
  • It was terrible, in my opinion, to create something that requires third party integration.
  • Not good at all to use AI, in my opinion.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Google App Engine, AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Run

Other Software Used

Google App Engine, Google Cloud AI, Google Gemini

Azure App Service

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have been using Azure App Service to modernize customer's .NET applications into a modern Platform As A Service (PaaS) and cloud-native application architecture platform. App Service allows me to provide a fully-managed environment and allow the customer to offload their administrative overhead for application infrastructure, while at the same time providing them with infrastructure monitoring, backup, scalability and service redundancy.

Pros

  • Continuous integration and Continuous deployment (CI/CD)
  • Scalability (scaling-up and scaling-out)
  • Redundancy
  • Performance
  • Security

Cons

  • Automatic update and management of managed TLS certificates
  • Better integration with Content Delivery Networks
  • Built-in security mechanisms

Return on Investment

  • By deploying Azure App Service, customers have achieved a TCO reducation of approximately 30% on average
  • By deploying Azure App Service, customers have achieved a ROI reducation of approximately 20% on average
  • By deploying Azure App Service, developer teams' overhead has significantly decreased by 40%, so developers can focused on their apps' business logic rather than infrastructure management.

Usability

Other Software Used

Azure Front Door, Azure Arc, Azure Traffic Manager, Azure Load Balancer, Azure AI Document Intelligence, Azure AI Vision, Azure AI Studio, Azure AI Language, Azure AI Speech, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Azure API Management, Azure VPN Gateway, Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure Firewall, Azure Backup, Microsoft Entra ID

Great product, easy to use, careful use of autoscaling

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Azure Web Apps for our Front End and some big data processing needs: for the monolith and some microservices. Also we host APIs over them. Web Apps offer an easy to use platform for creating and modifying our code in a seamless way across different stages of our data ingestion-processing-and offering for the customers.

Pros

  • Extremely easy to deploy and update from Visual Studio
  • It integrates seamlessly with other Azure PaaS resources
  • It has an in-depth integration with AppInsights, so you can understand errors and their root cause easily.
  • Easy to create and delete, what is not the same case in a IaaS resource
  • It escalates based on CPU workload and some other resource variables.
  • Configuration changes are almost immediate
  • Offers an excellent abstraction from hardware backend of the platform
  • That's updated very often, saving time and the risk of a self-performed update over a IaaS
  • That's really easy to develop for Web Apps
  • It supports Function Apps and Web Apps into the same "cost black box"

Cons

  • Irrationally expensive
  • High latency and poor response times in heavy workloads
  • Some updates lead to failures and crashes of hosted apps
  • Tech support starts defending Microsoft rather than helping you to get rid of a production failure
  • That's easy to have a peak cost with automatic resources escalation.
  • Lacks of spent money limits for escalation
  • Unnecessary deprecation of runtimes that makes the platform less interesting for complex applications that can't be updated periodically
  • Every single minor feature that's an spending. For example, a basic firewall.

Return on Investment

  • When workload was medium-low and medium-high it escalated and performed in a very good way. We saved a lot of time and a specialized role for managing it. Also, compared to an IaaS solution, was reasonably expensive.
  • Many platform issues on 2020 caused problems with our business. Downtime was reimbursed, but some customers were lost and churn grew.
  • Using AppServices and Web Apps as a Big Data processing platform was not a good idea, specially when data volumes grew and every escalation in resources was 2x of the previous stage cost.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft IIS, Apache Tomcat and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Other Software Used

Azure HDInsight, Azure Data Factory, Azure API Management

Azure serves well in long-term!

Pros

  • It has options to deploy using CI/CD.
  • It has great integration with Azure Devops
  • It has all the common runtimes, so we don't need to install softwares.

Cons

  • Some times our .NET API Service crashes and it is hard to find the root cause.
  • Quick Links to frequently used pages will help
  • PHP 8 is not supported yet.

Most Important Features

  • Devops CI/CD piplelines
  • Azure Kubernetes
  • We use the Sprint Board for project Planning.

Return on Investment

  • Download time is reduced because of auto scaling feature.
  • Insight tool helps in finding issues quickly.
  • CI/CD has helped in automation.

Alternatives Considered

Linode

Other Software Used

Linode, Google App Engine, AWS Auto Scaling