I have an app service running on Azure with an associated SQL server DB.
I would like to create a test environment for the project.
I looked at a few Azure Dev/Test tutorials but they are for setting up VMs and I couldn't see anything indicating it can be used for a app service.
Is my only option to duplicate the appservice, db, ssl certs, custom domains and effectively double my azure bill?
Bruno gave good advice, but here's a few more things to consider.
If you use deployment slots, you are sharing your Web App CPU and memory between all slots. If something goes horribly wrong with a test build that's deployed to a slot on your production machine, your production environment can end up resource starved. I personally don't recommend using slots for testing for this reason. Slots are more for smoke testing/warming up a build that you're about to swap into your production slot.
If you want to save money yet still have the benefit of separate environments, consider looking into ARM templates. ARM templates let you script the provisioning of Azure resources. You can create ARM templates based on your production environment, including scripting the App Settings section of your Web App to hold test configuration settings. You can then deploy your ARM template that spins up a test environment right from a Visual Studio project. If you put all of your test resources into the same resource group, tearing down your test environment is a few mouse clicks to delete the test resource group.
For the App Service, you have something called Slots. This allows you to have multiple environments on the same App Service. You can also have multiple Web Apps under the same App Service Plan as well instead of using Slots, so in this case, you only pay for 1 backend. App Service has a Free Tier, but with limitations such as not supporting custom domains.
Set up staging environments in Azure App Service
For SQL Databases you have to pay for each DB or use Elastic Pools (1 backend for multiple DBs) but that's only worth when you're using at least 100DTUs DBs. The minimum database you can have is the Basic one, but that's $6/month.
Related
Our company website will soon be hosted in an App Service in Azure. The website communicates with an API layer that also hosted in Azure and links to our internal systems and databases. The architecture at this level cannot be changed at this time and has quite a bit of background history, etc.
We are looking at implementing always on deployments using Deployment Slots in the App Service in Azure. The API layer will have non-breaking changes for each deployment and deploying the APIs will be the first part of any release, with the website following.
Is have a clear separation between our environments and the release will be tested in Dev, Test and Pre-Prod environments before the production deployment begins. Overall the whole process is fairly simple until it comes to post-implementation (PI) testing that is currently this is mandatory in our company.
We need to be able to test the production deployment prior to the customers using the site. Currently we feature toggle the site into maintenance mode unless its being accessed from a select IP address list. We now need to perform the PI testing on the new version of the site whilst the customer continues to use the older version of the site. I wasn't sure of the best way of achieving this.
One idea I did have is having a subdomain that links directly to the websites _staging deployment slot bypassing the deployment slot settings. In turn some logic in here could go direct to the API _staging deployment slot. This would give the option to post implement the change just prior to clicking the 'Swap' button to swap over the deployment slots.
I know the overall process isn't ideal, but at the moment this can't be changed. Does anyone have any thoughts or other suggestions on the above please?
Azure makes it easy to create deployment slots for App Services. It’s available in the Standard or Premium App Service plan mode. Deployment slots are actually live apps with their own hostnames. App content and configuration elements can be swapped between two deployment slots, including the production slot.
Azure customers can easily perform the following steps
- Deploy the web application to an online deployment slot.
- Run the tests on a deployment slot, within the live environment that potential testers are going to use. Testing environment and production environment exist side-by-side and provide the similar environment.
- Perform an internal swapping of the IP addresses of both slots (via load balancing and traffic management for both the nodes — slots)
- Update applications with zero downtime
- Swap back to a previous version of your app instantly, with zero downtime for users.
References
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/deploy-staging-slots
The overall reason to have deployment slots enabled is that it helps your team to run live testing on the production environment, and in case there are some problems on the production slot, it lets you roll back the swap without having to take your application down for maintenance.
I have created multiple slots(test, stage and prod) in my azure app service. Similarly I have created respective web.config files for each environment. I am deploying my application through octopus deployment tool in test environment slot, so initially it's picking web.test.config file and it's working fine.
But, I want to swap complete transformation section of web.config file when I swap it to stage or Prod slot while doing swapping through azure portal. Is there any way to do ?
using application setting and connection string of configuration setting, I am able to segregate the setting of each slot. But I am not sure how can I do it for other section like system.identityModel,system.web system.identityModel.services, etc. Therefore I want to replace complete transformation section according to environment while doing swapping.
When I talked with the app service team, they said slots are not meant for this purpose. The main purpose of slots is to allow deployment of new versions with little or no downtime. Or to test new features with a small percentage of the traffic. Not really for different environments, you should use have separate app services for that, to which you deploy separately.
Recently I've started experimenting and getting familiar with some of the Azure offerings. I made a simple app, connected it with azure functions and azure storage as well as some other offerings like service bus for example.
So far so good, the app is working great and I got my feet wet with some great Azure services.
But now I'm unsure on how best to proceed because what I have so far is a development version of my app. If I wanted to make a prod version do I have to provision a different set of all the azure resources used for the dev version?
So basically, I would have mydevsite.azurewebsites.net and myprodsite.azurewebsites.net. Is this correct? I can restrict mydevsite.azurewebsites.net with some IP address restrictions so that is not publicly available but I still feel this is a hacky way of doing this and that there should be a better way.
Is there a common approach to a scenario like this?
This is a bit of a broad question, but I can tell how I have done it before.
A common setup would be three environments, Dev, Test and Production.
Dev mostly runs on the developer's machine (as much as it can). We use a local IIS installation to run the web app, and a local SQL Server as a database. Azure Storage and Cosmos DB can also be emulated locally. Certain services like Search for example can't be run locally so you would have to run those in Azure anyway.
Test and Production are basically two identical resource groups with the same resources, just configured slightly differently. So double the App Service Plans, SQL databases etc.
Depending on how you want to do it though, you can of course share resources across environments. But it is a good idea to somehow make sure they do not accidentally use the other environment's stuff. And the definite bad side of this is that you are putting production data in the same place as test data, which frankly should not be together.
I know some organizations run a Dev environment fully in Azure. There can be a couple reasons for this: very heavy environment which can't really run on dev machines, or they want to test ARM template deployment at dev stage too.
Having duplicated services allows you to use ARM templates for automatically deploying and updating the infrastructure, which is pretty nice.
If you are on Standard or higher, you might think to use Deployment Slots in App Service for different environments, but they are really not meant for that purpose. We use them to reduce application downtime when deploying a new version, and as a fallback if the update turns out bad. So the deployment goes to a "staging" deployment slot, which gets swapped with the other one, and the new version is live. We then stop the deployment slot so we are not running the older version in the background unnecessarily.
But otherwise we have a separate App Service Plan with separate Web Apps with their own staging slots.
Deployment slots documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/web-sites-staged-publishing
We are currently running several Azure App Services which are having trouble with PCI-DSS compliance, due to the fact that App Services have TLSv1.0 enabled, with no option to disable it. After reading around, it seems like App Service Environments will allow us to do just that. However, I can't seem to figure out how to migrate our existing app to the new service environment. Do we just have to create a new app from scratch?
I assume your existing apps have already been deployed into existing App Service Plan? If so, you cannot move, all you can do is to clone it into a new ASP which has been deployed into your ASE
Given the fact that an ASP’s location (within an ASE or in a shared public location) cannot be changed once it is created, you have to clone/duplicate the deployments when you scale your apps in this approach. It also implies that the order you create resources is ASE (optional), then ASP, and finally add App Service apps into an ASP.
Or you can see my ASP/ASE learning at my blog
I have been busy breaking up a monolithic service layer into about 30 small 'chunks' that can be independently deployed (C#, web API).
At the same time, we are moving to Azure.
How should these microservices be deployed?
We need 4 environments (devint, QA, UA and Prod) so we were going to use 4 slots per PaaS, and a new Paas for every microservice.
But this would get expensive and hard to manager.
Are there better approaches? (I know little to nothing about Azure so any help is appreciated).
Thanks
Azure Service Fabric is built for Microservices, and would likely be the best option to go with. Especially for forward thinking when running on the Azure platform. However, depending on your time line the fact that Service Fabric is still in Preview may be an issue. Azure features in Preview don't have the full SLA guarantee that they will when made Generally Available (GA).
The simplest hosting solution to use for Microservices in Azure App Service would be to deploy the different services as Web Apps, possibly using Web Jobs for any background processing. Web Apps and Web Jos work extremely well for building Microservices, and I have used this approach on projects in the past.
Regarding you comment about "4 slots". If you are referring to Web App Deployment Slots, then you will want to reconsider having 4 deployment slots of the same Web App to host your different environments. Especially in Production, there should be a Deployment Slot used for the Live Production instance, and one slot for a Staging area used for testing deployments before swapping them. When it comes to Dev/Int, QA and UAT then you'll want to have 1 or more Web Apps with necessary Deployment Slots to fit your needs. The last thing you want to do is mix up your Dev/Int, QA, UAT and Production environments. It's also very important to understand that all the Deployment Slots for a single Web App run on the exact same Virtual Machine; which means if you have all 4 environments as Deployment Slots then your Dev and QA environments could affect the performance of Production; which would be horrible.
You should consider using Azure Web Apps to host your chunks because it doesn't require any customization of the API or Websites you code (unlike Cloud Services which have their packaging and deployment format). The same WebDeploy mechanism will work on any IIS server (on your own server, AWS or Azure)
Take a look at Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to define the underlying resources such as the hosting App service plan (equivalent to a web server), web apps and databases. You will in all likelihood have the same set of resources in each environment and different configuration (such as different API URLs) or minor tweaks (such a premium SQL plan or larger/more instances of the web applications). ARM template can thus be shared across the 4 environments with each environment having its own ARM parameter file.