Hello, and welcome to another article on Azure App Services. We previously wrote an introduction to Azure App Service, and then wrote an article on how to deploy a web app with Azure App Service. Today we’re going to talk about App Service plans.
The App Service plan consists of the underlying virtual machines that will host Azure App Services. It has several tiers, from free to premium.
The App Service plan defines the region of the physical server that will host your app, as well as the amount of storage, RAM, and CPU that the physical servers will have. The more resources, the higher the level and price.
Create a new Azure application service plan
Now let’s dive into the process and create a new service plan that will host all of our Azure applications.
First, sign in to the Azure portal, go to your dashboard, and then navigate to App Service plans.
Then click the Add button to begin the sequence for creating a new APp service plan.
The App Service plan name can be any name you want, and it is recommended that you make it specific to the types of apps you will be hosting there or to the level at which you intend to embed it.
At this point, I named mine MyTestPlan as it is not intended to host any real-world applications.
Then I selected an existing resource group, or you can create a new one. It is not recommended to create a resource group for every Azure service. Instead, you should create one or two resource groups and place all your resources in them.
You can choose between Linux and Windows in the operating system. I chose Windows for the purposes of this article.
The Location parameter defines the physical location where your application is planned to be located. In our case, this is 2 east of the United States.
Finally, we have the pricing tier. The tier controls the amount of resources you can assign to your plan and determines how well your application behaves in a production environment.
As you can see, we have several different tiers: Free, General, Basic, Standard, and Premium.
Let’s talk a little about each.
The free tier is obviously free, the general tier is very low cost, and both are hosted on shared infrastructures with other customers. This means that they are very inexpensive, but not recommended for production workloads.
Basic, Standard, and Premium are the next tiers after General, which provide you with sandboxed environments, which also means prices will go up as you have multiple virtual machines at your disposal rather than sharing a virtual machine with other clients.
They each offer different options in terms of RAM and CPU, but this is something you will need to evaluate before creating a data plan.
I hope you have found this article helpful and I hope you enjoyed reading it!