In 2022, many organizations emerged from the crisis-response mode of the past few years with renewed focus on application innovation and investing for growth. Azure delivered several new experiences to improve the speed, flexibility, and cost of your app modernization projects across the spectrum of languages, frameworks, and budgets. According to Gartner, 90 percent of enterprise applications will still be in use by 2025. Azure App Service is the leading platform to support your enterprise modernization journey with a lot of innovations in store for the new year. But first, let’s take the time to celebrate and appreciate the exciting announcements from the year that was.
New features and capabilities |
Day zero support for .NET 7 and introducing Go on App Service
Building on our stellar track record of providing day zero access to .NET releases, we announced support for .NET 7 at .NET Conf this year for Windows and Linux Azure App Service plans. Now enjoy increased performance automatically with a simple application restart. Additionally, we are excited to provide support for Go 1.18 and 1.19 as an experimental feature for the first time in App Service. Check it out and share your feedback in the comments below!
Fully managed service to deploy and manage WordPress sites
The much-anticipated general availability of WordPress on Azure App Service was announced this summer after a public preview earlier this year. Deploying and managing your WordPress sites with App Service offers unique benefits like support for Azure CDN support, Azure Blob storage, and more.
Big updates to the Azure App Service Environment
In September, we continued momentum by announcing the latest version of App Service Environment v3, which included key enhancements to speed, scalability, and offered Azure Virtual Network (Vnet) support. This Azure App Service feature provides fully isolated environments to securely run apps at scale. For greater flexibility in the new environment, we introduced larger SKUs to provide customers more options when deciding their compute needs in the Azure portal. Rounding out our improvements this year to App Service Environment v3 is the new planned maintenance feature. Users can now configure maintenance cycles manually or automatically. These new features and cost savings in v3 make migrating a no-brainer for existing App Service Environment users.
Guidance for scenarios with App Service patterns
This year, we produced two in-depth looks at some useful scenarios you can unlock with Azure App Service patterns. In the first scenario we guide you through setting up an n-tier application. We begin by creating the network infrastructure, building out the backend, followed by the front end, and wrap up with the deployment of the source code itself. Users are left with the blueprint for creating a secure web app with network-isolated communication to a backend web app.
The second scenario focuses on protecting your app’s availability in unpredictable weather with a highly available multi-region application. We start by deploying necessary infrastructure, then go over your options for managing source code, and wrap up by covering deployment.
New ways to save on compute with Azure App Service
This year we doubled down on Azure’s cost-effectiveness by announcing the Azure savings plan for compute. Azure App Service is one of several services eligible for the savings plan and gives users an easy and flexible way to save on compute costs. This new plan helps users save money, budget more evenly, and scale faster while preparing for inevitable surprise business expenses. For users on a tighter budget, we continued our commitment to supporting the free tier of App Service for the tenth straight year.
Enabling large scale migration with Azure Migrate
In August, we announced Azure Migrate’s new support of unified, at-scale, agentless migration for ASP.NET web apps to Azure App Service. This is the newest capability in a series of planned updates including support for additional web servers, languages, virtualization platforms, and much more.
App modernization drives efficiencies and savings for developers worldwide |
228 percent return on investment with Azure PaaS
Helping customers drive efficiencies on their application modernization journey has been the heart and soul of our work this year. As a new total economic impact (TEI) study conducted by Forrester demonstrates, Azure PaaS is the key to unlocking value and enabling that journey. With a 228 percent return on investment (ROI), speed increases for application development as high as 50 percent, and app-dev cost reduction by up to 40 percent, Azure PaaS helps fuel app innovation rather than infrastructure spending.
NBA customer story on transforming user experiences during Covid-19
Back in November, we wrote about partnering with the NBA to modernize their applications with Azure. This was a big moment for the NBA, its fans, and the Azure App Innovation team. We deliver a faster time to market for apps that elevate the experience wherever fans, referees, and employees engage.
Check out the demos and on-demand sessions from Microsoft Ignite
App modernization at scale and innovation took center stage in breakout session #BRK43 at Microsoft Ignite 2022. In this session, Scott Hunter and I chat with Sahil Gupta of the NBA about how Azure PaaS can help accelerate time-to-market while lowering costs and reducing operational complexity. In case you missed it, we published a handy reference of new features and capabilities we announced for App Service at this year’s event.
Take the next step
Get started today with Azure App Service to give your team the competitive advantage that app modernization provides.
If you’re ready to begin, check out our partner portal, where you can learn about Microsoft partners who have specialized services for your application requirements.
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