Azure App Service Plans – PaaS Compute Options

Azure App Service Plans – PaaS Compute Options

Every App Service you create in Azure runs inside an App Service plan. If you are not aware of App Service, you can consider it as an instance of your application for the time being. In other words, every application you create runs inside an App Service plan. The plan is responsible for providing the compute resources for the application to run. The compute resources are similar to the server farms in conventional web hosting.

App Service plans are created at a regional scope. For example, if you create an App Service plan in East US, then a set of compute resources will be provisioned in East US for you. The compute resources will be used as a hosting environment to deploy your web apps. The pricing of every application is done at the App Service plan level, which means even if you don’t deploy any applications to the plan, you will be still charged for the plan as the compute resources are provisioned. As long as there is enough room, you can deploy more applications to a single App Service plan.

From a cost optimization standpoint, it’s better to use a single App Service plan for hosting multiple applications. As long as there are enough resources to handle the workload, you can keep adding applications to the same plan. It’s important that you determine the number of resources required for the app to run before pushing it to the plan. An application with high resource utilization may collapse other co-existing applications in the plan if there is no room. This kind of overloading may lead to potential downtime of all applications deployed in your plan. You can think of creating a new App Service Plan when:

• You are deploying a resource-intensive application.
• You require independent scaling from other apps.
• Your app needs to be deployed to a different Azure region.
• You require a different operating system for your application stack.

The aforementioned criteria can be kept as a baseline for creating additional App Service plans. The App Service plan comes in different pricing tiers packed with different features and capabilities. Let’s take a glimpse at the pricing tiers available for App Service plans.