Pricing Tiers – PaaS Compute Options

Pricing Tiers – PaaS Compute Options

In the case of VMs, there were different VM families targeting a different set of workloads. Each of these VM families comes with different hardware combinations and capabilities. Likewise, in Azure App Service plans you use the pricing tier to determine the features that you get as part of the plan and also how much you pay for the plan. The following are the available pricing tiers:

• Free and Shared: This provides a shared environment for deploying applications. As this is a shared environment, your applications will be deployed to the same underlying VMs alongside other customer deployments. This tier is not recommended for production purposes and has time constraints. You can use this tier for development and testing purposes only, and these tiers are not backed up by any sort of SLA.
• Basic: This is ideal for applications with low traffic requirements, and at the same time, you don’t need autoscaling or advanced features. This tier offers a dedicated environment unlike the Free and Shared. Also, it has a built-in load balancer for load balancing between instances.
• Standard: This is ideal for running production applications. It offers autoscaling and other advanced capabilities. Like Basic, you have a built-in load balancing for balancing traffic across the instances.
• Premium: This offers better performance for production apps. The key difference from Standard is that Premium offers SSD storage, faster processors, and double the memory-to-core ratio.
• Isolated: This provides a native virtual network integration and targets mission-critical workloads. This helps customers to run apps in a private, dedicated, and isolated environment.

Table 9.1 shows a quick comparison between these tiers and the set of supported features.

TABLE 9.1  App Service Plan: Pricing Tiers

	Free	Shared	Basic	Standard	Premium	Isolated
Target	Free environment	Shared environment for testing	Dedicated environment for dev/test	Run production workloads	Enhanced performance for production workloads	High-performance, security, and isolation
Web, mobile, or API apps	10	100	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Disk space	1 GB	1 GB	10 GB	50 GB	250 GB	1 TB
Max: instances	✕	✕	Up to 3	Up to 10	Up to 30	Up to 100
Custom domain	✕
Autoscale	✕	✕	✕
Hybrid connectivity	✕	✕
Virtual network connectivity	✕	✕	✕
Private endpoints	✕	✕	✕	✕
Compute type	Shared	Shared	Dedicated	Dedicated	Dedicated	Isolated

 For Premium and Isolated plans, the maximum number of instances will vary based on the selected region. You can reach out to Microsoft Support and see if the limit can be increased.

In Table 9.1, you can see that autoscaling is supported from Standard tier onward. Let’s understand how scaling is done in an Azure App Service plan.