Announcing General Availability of Premium v4 for Azure App Service

We are excited to announce that Premium v4 is now Generally Available on Azure App Service for both Windows and Linux customers!  Key benefits of Premium v4 include:

• Fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to run your favorite web stack, on both Windows and Linux.
• Built using latest-gen Azure hardware for higher performance and reliability.
• Lower total cost of ownership with new pricing tailored for large-scale app modernization projects.
• Azure cost-saving options (Savings Plans and Reservations) are available as part of the Premium v4 GA!

High Performance and Reliability

App Service Premium v4 GA runs on the latest AMD-based Dadsv6 / Eadsv6 series virtual machines with NVMe based temporary storage, delivering higher performance and more attractive pricing compared to previous Premium generations.

Premium v4 provides a combination of CPU/memory choices with four non-memory optimized options (P0v4 though P3v4) and five memory-optimized options (P1mv4 through P5mv4).  Options range from 1 virtual CPU and 4GB of memory all the way up through 32 virtual CPUs and 256GB of memory. Features such as deployment slots, integrated monitoring, and enhanced global zone resilience using availability zones further enhance reliability and user experience.

In general customers can expect to see the following improvements using Premium v4:

• >50% performance improvement for P1v4-P3v4 plans, relative to the prior generation of non-memory optimized P1v3-P3v3 plans.
• >25% performance improvement for memory-optimized P*mv4 plans, relative to the prior generation of memory-optimized P*mv3 plans.

During recent load tests exercising the new SKU (test details below), Premium v4 demonstrated ~58% higher throughput using a memory optimized P1mv4 compared to a memory optimized P1mv3.  The same load tests showed ~27% higher throughput using P1v4 compared to P1v3.  Response times were also consistently better on the Pv4 variants compared to the earlier Pv3 variants.

Load Test Details

The team ran comparative load tests for Premium v4 and Premium v3 with a classic ASP.NET version of the devshop site that has been used in App Service labs and presentations over the last few years.  The application is a simple classic ASP.NET site consisting of a few .aspx pages including a homepage, product category pages, and product detail pages.  The site makes no external calls to databases or cache servers.

An Azure App Testing deployment in the same region as the test website was used for generating and measuring load.  The load test exercised the product home page and one product category page:

xxxxx-abbbccdffghjkrsv.eastus-01.azurewebsites.net/

xxxxx-hgscbdrfbvkabcjf.eastus-01.azurewebsites.net/Productslist.aspx?CategoryID=1

Load tests were tuned to drive the underlying worker instance to around 80% CPU utilization, a value high enough to provide a good estimate of performance under load while still ensuring sufficient CPU headroom and not overloading the underlying VMs.  All tests used a single instance app service plan.

Load testing results:

[*Note: there can be some variance in the performance of SKUs depending on the underlying type of Azure VM used.  For this load test, P1v3 running on Standard_D2d_v4 was compared to P1v4 running on Standard_D2ads_v6. P1mv3 running on Standard_E2ads_v5 was compared to P1mv4 running on Standard_E2ads_v6.]

Getting Started

Premium v4 GA is now available in twenty regions! Customers can reference the product documentationfor details on how to configure Premium v4 as well as a regularly updated list of regional availability.

We encourage you to assess your apps using partnersand tools for application modernization. Start using Premium v4 and gain the benefits of higher performance and lower TCO for your application modernization projects today!

Key Resources

• Azure App Service documentation: https://aka.ms/AppService/Pv4docs
• Azure App Service web page: https://www.azure.com/appservice 
• Follow us on X: @AzAppService