A monthly look back on the new releases from the last month for the Microsoft Azure WebApp platform. I’m spending a great deal of my time working with WebApps, and hopefully this series will help
both myself and others keep track of what’s new, what’s coming, and what’s going in the world of Azure App Services and Static Web Apps.
Platform enabled DR capabilities end March 2025
This is a change in how App Services will act in the event of a region outage. Currently if there is a disaster that impacts an entire Azure region App Services hosted in that region will be placed in “disaster recovery mode”. This allows them to be quickly restored to a new App in a different region, or the app content extracted for deployment elsewhere.
From next March this service will not be offered and admins are advised to configure backup to a GZRS or GRS Storage Account for replication to a secondary region. For less downtime in this sort of event, running an active/active (or active/passive with good detection) fronted by Azure Front Door is recommended.
Beginning 31 March 2025, we’ll no longer place Azure App Service web applications in disaster recovery mode in the event of a disaster in an Azure region. We strongly encourage you to implement commonly used disaster recovery techniques to prevent loss of functionality or data for your web apps if there’s a regional disaster.
Backup and restore capabilities are included in Basic and higher pricing tiers. The Free and Shared pricing tiers of App Service are not recommended for production scenarios and are not backed by any SLAs. If you have web applications deployed to the Free or Shared tier and you want to implement a disaster recovery strategy for them, scale up to Basic tier or higher.
Azure Load Testing on Azure App Service Web Apps
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This feature is in Public Preview. Preview features let you try new functionality before it is released. This feature may have limited support from Microsoft, and could change if/when it becomes Generally Available (GA).
It is now possible to configure load tests for your web apps directly from the App Service blade in the Azure portal. This testing was possible before, but the configuration route has been simplified by bringing it into
the WebApp pages in the portal. A new load test can now be configured with a couple of clicks.
There is an associated cost, so whilst you can even run it against a Free-tier WebApp, there’s a monthly cost of £8/month for up to 50 hours of testing. Check out the Azure Pricing site for details.
This feature is in Public Preview. Preview features let you try new functionality before it is released. This feature may have limited support from Microsoft, and could change if/when it becomes Generally Available (GA).
WebJobs allow background tasks to be run in WebApps, in much the same way that you might have a scheduled task or cron job on an IaaS virtual machine. This feature is GA in Windows App Services and now in preview in Linux ones.
WebJobs are available for all tiers of WebApp, including Free. However to run against a schedule or continuously a higher SKU will be required (Basic, Standard, and Premium tiers) as the “Always On” feature isn’t available
to the free tier so the WebApp would stop because of inactivity and not run the WebJob
This feature is in Public Preview. Preview features let you try new functionality before it is released. This feature may have limited support from Microsoft, and could change if/when it becomes Generally Available (GA).
Previously mentioned in my November 2023 post, this preview is now available in all Azure regions.
