Azure App Service: Microsoft bundles three cloud service into one

As part of its mobile-first, cloud-first strategy, Microsoft has announced the launched of Azure App Service. The cloud service enables developers to build web and mobile apps for any platform and any device. “App Service is an integrated solution that streamlines development while enabling easy integration with on-premises and SaaS systems while providing the ability to quickly automate business processes,” Bill Staples, corporate vice president, app platform, Microsoft Azure, said. Azure App Service brings together the capabilities from Azure Websites, Azure Mobile Services, and Azure BizTalk Services into an integrated offering. The service includes app types including, web apps, mobile apps, logic apps, and API apps. [caption id=“attachment_2172681” align=“alignnone” width=“450”]  Azure App Service[/caption] Web Apps allow users host any website, web app, and API in the cloud. Existing Azure websites customers’ existing web apps will run as-is in App Service with zero changes. They also have access to all of the other app types and features at no additional cost. Their existing web hosting plan, now the app hosting plan, will be able to also run mobile, logic and api apps at same price. Web Apps empowers enterprises through specific capabilities like hybrid connectivity and Active Directory integration. “Web Apps can auto-scale to meet any needs, and offer high-availability through deployment in several geo-locations with Azure Traffic Manager.” Based on Azure Mobile Services, Mobile Apps provide developers with a set of client SDKs including Windows, iOS and Android as well as multi-platform environments such as Xamarin and Cordova. With Mobile Apps, users can easily send push notifications to their app, add login, and store data in the cloud with offline sync to any mobile client. With App Service, Mobile Apps gain new features such as staging slots for deployment, WebJobs, traffic manager support, better scale options, and more. Logic Apps allow any developer or technical user to automate business process execution via a visual designer. Accompanied by a marketplace of API App connectors, Logic Apps can integrate users data and services from their SaaS apps like SalesForce, DropBox and Office 365 to their favorite Azure PaaS Services and others from the likes of Twilio and Twitter. “Logic Apps connectivity is built on the foundation of API apps, meaning you can easily bring your own services and functionality to the party. And for enterprise-grade integration needs our connector library includes capabilities from Microsoft Azure’s integration platform, BizTalk Services; including built-in API apps for message validation, transformation, a rules engine, trading partner management and hybrid connectivity, all built-in,” added Staples. API Apps allow technical users or developers to discover, host and manage API’s and SaaS connectors in the cloud. With API Apps, developers can select from a library of existing on-premises and cloud APIs as well as contribute their own APIs easily for public or private use by Logic, Web, and Mobile apps in Azure App Service. API Apps provide versioning capabilities for APIs making it easy to manage new versions and automatically update the applications that use them in real time without downtime. APIs can be consumed in a variety of programming languages with tooling that generates SDKs in all the languages supported in App Service (.NET, Node.js, Java, PHP and Python). Determine who can access APIs with simple controls to require authenticated users, public users or just other apps inside App Service. Protect APIs with enterprise grade security using Active Directory including single sign on and social identity using Google, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft accounts. Consume third party services with built in support for OAuth and a secure token store to store access credentials with no coding. API Apps provide a tightly integrated development experience ranging from the VS IDE to the cloud with tools like cloud debugging, live tracing and Testing in Production (TiP). App Service is generally available, with the Mobile, Logic, and API app types still in public preview. App Service pricing is the same as existing Azure Websites pricing, offering new capabilities from Mobile, Logic, and API apps at no extra cost.