Azure For Developers – Part 2: Your First App Service

This is part 2 of an ongoing series on Azure for Developers, based on a set of forthcoming videos from LinkedIn Learning

In Part 1 of this series, we began to look at some of the ways to “chunk” the various parts of Azure, and focused in on PaaS (Platform as a Service).  Let’s get started on our first App Service.

Open the Portal and log in as described in Part 1.  On the left, click App Services.  At the moment, you don’t have any, so click Create App Service.  This opens a long menu of App Services.  Scroll through and see what is available.

Click on ASP.NET Starter.  That brings up a review “blade.”  click  Create  This will bring up the ASP.NET Starter Web App blade, where you can configure your starter app.  Fill in a name.  To avoid conflicts I typically begin my application names with a couple letters followed by a dash, followed by the name.  For example, here I might use jl-firstApp.

Pick your subscription type (if you have more than one) and then create a new resource group.  Resource groups are a great way to bundle all the “pieces” of an application so that you can deal with them all at once.  One of the ways we’ll do so is to delete the resource group when we are done with it, and thus delete all the resources (apps, databases, etc.) at once.

Click on AppServicePlan and then Create New  Name your AppService plan (e.g., jl-firstApp-serviceplan) and pick a location (e.g.,  East US) and finally click on Pricing Tier.  This is the key reason we’re creating a new Service Plan – to manage the cost of our service.

Scroll down through the various pricing tiers.  They range tremendously in cost, depending on what resources you need.

For this exercise, the least expensive tier (B1 Basic) will be fine.  We won’t need many computing resources at all.

Click on Basic B1 to select it and then click on select at the bottom of the blade.   This brings us back to the New App Service Plan blade where you can click OK.

That brings you all the way back to the ASP.NET Starter Web App blade, with your service plan in place.  AT the bottom of the blade, check Pin to Dashboard and click Create

We are immediately brought to a summary of our new application. Our service is being run on a virtual machine but that is not visible to us; we don’t have to care about the infrastructure, we can focus on the application.

Click on the url in the upper right to launch our new ASP.NET application.

 

Notice the URL in your browser.  Your app is running on Azure (!)

 

You can now download your application and work with it, but the more common approach is to create an application in Visual Studio and then deploy it to Azure.  We’ll look at that in the next posting in this series.

 

 

About Jesse Liberty

Jesse Liberty has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects and is the author of 2 dozen books and a couple dozen online courses. His latest book, Building APIs with .NET will be released early in 2025. Liberty is a Senior SW Engineer for CNH and he was a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T, a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. He is a Microsoft MVP.
This entry was posted in Essentials. Bookmark the permalink.