AZ-204 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Exam
You can develop, but can you develop for the cloud? Harness your development skills and learn how to create robust solutions for Microsoft Azure, aiming for your Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate certification!
Practice Test
Practice Test
Create an Azure App Service Web App
Configure App Service Plan and Web App Settings
App Service Plan is a set of dedicated compute resources that host one or more Web Apps in Azure. A Web App is an HTTP-based application managed by Azure, so you don’t have to manage servers directly. Together, these components allow you to run scalable web applications without worrying about underlying infrastructure. Understanding how they relate is important for building and managing modern apps.
When you create an App Service Plan, you pick several key settings that affect cost and performance:
- Pricing tier: Options like Free, Shared, Basic, Standard, Premium, or Isolated
- Region: The Azure geography where your compute resources live
- Scaling options:
- Scale up (vertical scaling) to move to a higher tier
- Scale out (horizontal scaling) by adding more instances
Choosing the right combination helps you balance budget and capacity.
To deploy a Web App, use the Azure portal, Azure CLI (az webapp create), or PowerShell (New-AzWebApp). When running these commands, you specify:
- The target App Service Plan
- The runtime stack (for example, Node.js or .NET)
- The resource group that holds related resources
By inheriting the plan’s compute resources, your Web App is ready to handle web traffic as soon as it’s created.
After deployment, you can add custom domains and SSL certificates to secure and brand your site. Custom domains require DNS updates (CNAME or A record) and domain verification. For SSL, use managed certificates or upload your own, then bind them to enable HTTPS. Finally, configure authentication, App settings, and Connection strings via CLI or PowerShell to manage environment variables and secrets at runtime without changing your code.
Conclusion
In this section, you learned how to set up an App Service Plan and create a Web App in Azure. You saw which important settings—like pricing tier, region, and scaling—affect performance and cost. You also explored ways to deploy your app using the portal, CLI, or PowerShell, and how to secure it with custom domains, SSL, and authentication. Finally, you discovered how to use App settings and Connection strings to manage runtime configuration in a safe and flexible way.