The market is highly competitive. The market demands organizations to survive and thrive in this profoundly changing business environment. Cost efficiency, hassle-free maintenance, quick deployment, enhanced productivity, high availability, and global scale are some of the credentials, to name a few. Cloud technology has come to the rescue of businesses by enabling them to achieve some of these factors.
Azure Web App provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). It offers services that developers can use for developing web or mobile apps, Logic apps, or API apps. It can host a backend service like Web APIs, WCF Service, or an interactive user application. With a plethora of such incredible benefits, overlook Azure’s potential for their business? And the numbers are evident! Today, 41% of organizations run significant workloads on Azure.
- Pay-per-use pricing
Microsoft Azure Web App Services are ideal for all businesses due to their pay-as-you-go pricing. These cost-effective services come with built-in load balancers that further save infrastructure costs. Also, you can opt to scale up or down the hardware based on the expected load. It offers direct savings due to low infrastructure requirements during off-peak times.
For example, a startup can start with minimal configuration and low costs. Once their user base grows, Azure automatically scales up resources to accommodate increased traffic. This flexibility enables efficient cost allocation and seamless scaling without manual intervention.
- No server maintenance
With Microsoft Azure Web Apps, all you have to do is deploy your apps, and it will take care of the other activities. It saves you from the hassle of server maintenance. It eliminates the need for space, infrastructure and cost of managing a server room and the personnel to manage servers.
For instance, let us consider a scenario where a company hosts its web application on Azure Web App Services.
With traditional server hosting, the company would have to allocate resources, manage server updates, handle security patches, and ensure hardware maintenance.
However, with Azure Web App Services, the burden of server maintenance is lifted. It takes care of:
- Hardware management
- Operating system updates
- Security patches
- Infrastructure maintenance.
This allows businesses to focus solely on developing and deploying their web applications without worrying about the server maintenance tasks.
The Azure platform handles the backend infrastructure seamlessly, ensuring high availability and reliability of the web app. You can save time and effort for your business, reduce the need for dedicated IT personnel or server rooms, further leading to cost savings.
- Significantly secured Web App Development
Azure Web App Services provides platform and infrastructure security through multi-factor authentication and ISO and PCI compliance. Thus, you can entirely get assured that the app development and implementation process deliver the enterprise-level SLA.
Let’s consider an example of a company developing a healthcare application using Microsoft Azure.
As the healthcare application collects and stores sensitive patient data, such as medical records and personal information, it is vital to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and privacy of this application data.
Azure provides a comprehensive suite of security tools and services. For instance, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) enables multi-factor authentication, ensuring that only authorized individuals can access the web application and patient data. Role-based access control (RBAC) allows fine-grained control over user permissions, limiting access to specific data and functionalities based on user roles and responsibilities.
To protect data at rest and in transit, Azure offers encryption mechanisms. The company can leverage Azure Disk Encryption to encrypt data stored in Azure’s virtual disks. Apart from this, Azure Web App Services supports secure communication through SSL/TLS encryption, ensuring encrypted sensitive information during transmission.
Azure Security Center provides continuous monitoring and threat detection capabilities. It scans for vulnerabilities, identifies potential security issues, and provides actionable insights to improve the application security posture. This proactive approach helps the company detect and respond to security threats in real-time, reducing the risk of data breaches or unauthorized access.
Moreover, Azure adheres to industry standards and compliance frameworks such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). This process will ensure meeting necessary regulatory requirements, protecting patient data and maintaining compliance.
- Versatile and multilingual framework
Azure Web App Services support multiple infrastructures and languages-Java (8, 11, and 17), Node.js, Tomcat, PHP, Python, .NET Core, and Ruby.
Check out why is Microsoft Azure winning hearts over AWS?
- Enhances developer productivity
Azure Web Services have made app deployment from various Integrated Development Environments (IDE) easier than ever before. You can quickly deploy apps from different IDEs, including Visual Studio (with Azure SDK), IntelliJ IDEA and Xcode. The features like Visual Studio integration help organizations with creating, testing, deploying and debugging with a variety of efficient tools. With Azure SDK on Visual Studio, you can quickly query the database hosted on one of the Azure and make Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) operations easier and live on Azure App. Additionally, a wide range of application templates available in the Azure Marketplace can come in handy to enhance the developer’s creativity and productivity
Let’s take an example. With Azure Web App Services, a development team building an e-commerce application can deploy their latest code changes directly from Visual Studio, eliminating the need for manual deployment steps. This process will save time, reduce errors, and empower developers to focus on adding new features and improving the application functionality.
- Global Scale with high availability
As businesses can deploy data and host services anywhere automatically or manually with a single mouse click on Microsoft’s global data center infrastructure, Azure App Service offers high availability with 99.5% SLA uptime. Further, you can automatically scale horizontally or vertically based on application performance. You can also set custom rules to take care of peaks in the workload and off-peak times automatically to minimize costs. The new D-Series compute option can facilitate you to meet the most rigorous scalability requirement and application performance.
Imagine a popular e-commerce platform that experiences high traffic and demands uninterrupted availability. With Azure’s high availability features, the platform ensures a seamless user experience even during peak shopping seasons.
Azure App Service automatically scales the application horizontally to handle increased traffic. With features like auto-scaling, load balancing, and traffic distribution across multiple instances, the platform can meet the demands of a massive concurrent users without any degradation in performance.
Additionally, Azure’s global data center infrastructure ensures redundancy and fault tolerance. If one data center experiences an outage or disruption, Azure App Service automatically redirects traffic to another available data center. This process minimizes downtime and ensures uninterrupted service.
By relying on Azure’s high availability capabilities, the e-commerce platform can confidently handle high volumes of online transactions, maintain user satisfaction, and prevent revenue loss due to service interruptions.
- Quick analytics and actionable insights
With Azure Web Apps, you can have a complete check on the health and end-to-end application performance. You can check in-depth resource usage with the detailed views provided by the Azure Monitor and get deeper insights regarding your app’s response times, throughput, error trend and CPU and memory utilization with Application Insight. It facilitates you to make better decisions to enhance your business. You can use Site Extensions to add various functionalities such as additional management functions, monitoring solutions, Azure Service Profiler and many more to your application
Picture this-
A popular video streaming service serves millions of users worldwide. To sustain this competition, they must ensure an optimal streaming experience.
Here is where Azure comes in with its analytics and insights capabilities.
Azure provides tools like Azure Monitor and Azure Application Insights, which allow the streaming platform to gain real-time visibility into various performance metrics. They can monitor response times, error rates, throughput, and resource utilization to identify potential bottlenecks or issues affecting the user experience.
By analyzing these insights, the streaming platform can quickly identify areas for improvement and take actionable steps to enhance performance. For example, they might identify a specific region experiencing high latency and optimize their content delivery network (CDN) configuration to ensure faster streaming speeds for users in that region.
Furthermore, Azure’s analytics capabilities enable the platform to track user behavior and preferences, helping them personalize content recommendations and improve user engagement. By analyzing viewing patterns and content ratings, they can offer tailored suggestions and targeted advertisements, enhancing the overall user experience and driving customer satisfaction.
- Secure and cost-effective integration with other SaaS apps
Azure Web Apps enables you to integrate your web app development securely and easily with other SaaS apps such as Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Dropbox, and Concur. This ability to combine multiple apps serves as the best feature when it comes to significant cost savings.
WaferWire assisted a financial institution in achieving secure and cost-effective integration with Microsoft 365. By leveraging Azure Logic Apps, they seamlessly connected the institution’s core banking system with Microsoft 365 applications, enabling real-time data synchronization and enhancing collaboration. This integration improved productivity, and data security, and minimized costs by leveraging the pay-as-you-go model.
- Ship faster updates with deployment slots
Azure Web App Services offers continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) capabilities using DevOps, GitHub and Bit Bucket. It facilitates automated deployments.
With App Services creating an association with the selected repository, your apps are updated every time your source code changes. Deployment slots offer a duplicated environment. Thus, you can deploy a new version in staging where you can schedule quality and performance tests, swap from staging to production in seconds and roll back to previous versions without downtime and additional cost. Lately, we helped a software development company ship faster updates for their e-commerce application by leveraging deployment slots within Azure Web App Services.
With WaferWire’s expertise, the software development company harnesses the power of deployment slots to streamline their update deployment process. They create a staging slot, which serves as a duplicate environment of their web app within Azure Web App Services.
Using the staging slot, the company deploys and tests latest updates, features, or bug fixes in a controlled environment. WaferWire ensures a smooth testing and quality assurance process, minimizing the risk of issues impacting the live production environment.
Once the updates are thoroughly validated, WaferWire facilitates a seamless swap between the staging slot and the production slot. This allows the latest version to be instantly rolled out to the live production environment with a single mouse click.
In the event of any unforeseen issues, WaferWire enables the software development company to effortlessly roll back to the previous version by swapping the slots again. This provides a reliable safety net, ensuring a seamless user experience and minimizing disruptions.
By leveraging deployment slots with the guidance of WaferWire, the software development company achieves accelerated update deployments, reduces the risk of downtime or errors, and maintains an elevated level of agility. This allows them to deliver new features to their e-commerce application faster and with confidence, driving customer satisfaction and business growth.
Briefly, with its multitude of features and benefits, Azure Web App Services offer a truly versatile, quick and cost-effective solution for small and medium businesses across the globe. With our domain niche and experience, we can navigate your enterprise cloud adoption and help you reap maximum business benefits. For more information or queries related to Azure Web App Services, contact us, and our Azure experts will be happy to help you.
