Digital demand for goods, services and information is increasing and organizations of all sizes are investing in the web-based experiences that support their remote employees, customers, and partners.
As the pace of innovation quickens, we are seeing a convergence of several trends with our enterprise customers. On the one hand, Kubernetes has become a mainstream hosting option for modern web applications, but developer productivity is consistently cited as a barrier to adoption. At the same time, companies with large digital estates, who might naturally gravitate towards the simplicity of PaaS are looking for more control over underlying app infrastructure, often building and managing applications across clouds and on-premises, only to struggle with consistency and manageability.
Web apps, anywhere
This week at Build, we announced the preview of Azure application services running on Kubernetes and anywhere with Azure Arc. Customers can now use their favorite Azure applications services on CNCF-conformant Kubernetes clusters on-premises, at the edge, and across clouds in environments on AWS and Google Cloud Platform.
With this preview, customers no longer need to choose between the productivity of App Service and the flexibility and control of Kubernetes. They can now run Web Apps against a range of fully managed App Service plans or choose to deploy against their own infrastructure in Azure Kubernetes Service or Kubernetes clusters connected through Azure Arc.
App Service features like deployment slots, turn-key auth, CI/CD with GitHub Actions vastly simplify the development and management of web apps and are delivered with ARM consistency across hosting models. Customers can simply configure and enable any Kubernetes cluster and select those clusters as a deployment target when creating their Web App.
We see our customers creating the applications of the future, today and Azure is committed to empowering the developers that build them. During Preview, App Service on Kubernetes will be available for free in a limited set of regions, starting with East US and West Europe. To get started we have a set of scenario-based accelerators available on GitHub, as well as step by step tutorials and Learn modules on the App Service documentation page.
Investments in App Service Linux
This week we are also excited to share several additional investments making to improve the developer experience for Linux-based applications.
- New Language Support: Python and .NET Core are the two fastest growing languages on App Service, this month we are adding support for Python 3.9 and providing Early Access support for the .NET 6 Preview 4 release, just announced at Build.
- Strengthened CI/CD We have deepened our integration with GitHub Actions, offering CI/CD setup directly in the Web App Create Experience and expanding existing CI/CD automation for Node, .NET and Java with new support for Python.
- Free TLS: Our App Service Managed Certificates are now Generally Available for customers to secure custom domains and leave the lifecycle and syncing of the certificate to App Service. This feature is available for free and applies to both apex domains and sub-domain scenarios.
- JBoss EAP Support: In June, Azure in collaboration with RedHat will make integrated support for JBoss EAP general available on App Service Linux.
- Improved Isolated Environments: Our App Service Environment v3 Preview will be getting refreshed in early June with new load balancing capabilities that support both external and internal facing apps, and a new option for automatic zone resiliency when deployed in regions that support Availability Zones.
- Broader Monitoring: We’ve enabled built out-of-the-box monitoring for Node and Java apps through Application Insights, which automatically detects performance anomalies and uses built-in analytics to diagnose issues and suggest .
We believe these investments in App Service will continue to power the innovations of our customers as they extend and expand their web experiences to meet new user needs!
The home for web apps on Azure
It is an exciting time to be building web applications and our team is investing across the board to ensure that no matter the scenario, every developer is empowered to do their best work. Whether you are building a front end in Node or .NET using Static Web Apps, taking development to the edge or your own datacenter with our new preview Kubernetes capabilities, or powering your most sensitive web workloads on an isolated App Service Environment – App Service is the single platform for any web app you want to build.
