New App Service Environment in Azure

The birth of Azure's App Service Environment, introduced in 2015, can be understood by tracing the evolution of Microsoft's Azure cloud platform and the growing need for a more secure and isolated hosting environment for web applications.

By allowing developers to build, deploy, and scale web applications easily without managing the underlying infrastructure, Microsoft launched this Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, providing these developers a convenient way to host web applications.

Over the years, Microsoft continued to enhance this service with features and versioned platform upgrades, such as the ability to deploy into multiple subnets for high availability, support for multi-region deployments, and integration with Azure Private Link for further network isolation and therefore making it a leading platform for customers to use.

Latest App Service Environment platform upgrade

Today, new capabilities have been unlocked with the launch of App Service Environment v3 as App Service Environment versions 1 and 2 will reach end of life on August 31, 2024.

If you haven’t upgraded to v3 already, think of the many technical resources and benefits that should help you to plan the migration on your existing implementations. Just keep in mind that the EOL relies on the gradual retirement of the legacy Cloud Service infrastructure. This implies that your services may cease to operate once the specified deadline is reached.

It’s way easier to use and runs on greater infrastructure that can go up to 64 cores and 256-GB RAM with faster scaling speeds for both Windows and Linux operating systems and has simpler network topology.

Microsoft has published a range of tools and resources to give you the confidence to seamlessly upgrade to v3 and unlock its new capabilities. One resource to look out for is Microsoft Learn Live which is available on demand featuring FastTrack Architects covering a detail on how to complete such a migration.

Better bang for your buck when using App Service Environment v3

The new version provides a few enhancements that redefine the way developers and solution architects design, deploy, and manage their applications.

- Scaling and better performance: App Service Environment v3 runs on the latest Virtual Machine Scale Sets infrastructure, giving it the best performing and fastest scaling times across all versions. Front-end scaling is managed by the platform and scaling operations do not block other operations, unlike previous versions.

- More Secure: App Service Environment v3 is designed to eliminate networking dependencies on the customer’s virtual network, a big improvement over previous version. Management and dependency traffic stays within the Azure backbone, and the only traffic that traverses your virtual network is the application traffic to and from your apps.

- Enhanced robustness: In Azure regions enabled with Availability zones, an App Service Environment v3 can be configured to withstand a zonal failure within a region. This capability provides higher availability for deployed applications and automatically deploy instances across multiple zones for mission-critical apps.

- Cost savings: App Service Environment v3 is often cheaper than previous versions due to the removal of the stamp fee and larger instance sizes. You also get to take advantage of commitment-based offerings to reduce cost for resources using reserved instance pricing and Azure savings plans for compute, which are not available in the older versions.

Upgrading to version 3 is not only imperative, but a strategic move that unlocks many benefits for your customer’s organization. Stay ahead of the upcoming end-of-life deadline by contacting This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and our Surestep Ambassador team to book a session for further guidance on this transition.