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>> Hey, friends. Welcome to Microsoft Build live.
It's Azure Friday live.
This is the first time we've ever done this.
It's a bit of an experiment.
I'm Scott Hanselman and I've done
Azure Friday for almost 500 episodes.
We thought while we were here at Microsoft Build,
we would pull a few episodes of Azure Friday
out of thin air and for our first episode,
we've got Byron Tardif from App Service. How are you sir?
>> I'm very good Scott. Thanks for having
me and thanks for everybody here.
I'm very excited to talk about App Service and what's new.
>> Yes, thanks for being a part of this.
Maybe you'll let us do this again sometime.
>> Awesome, yes.
>> Excellent. So you know I'm a huge App Service fan.
I have a lot of stuff running in App Service and I
know that a few things in App Service have changed,
been updated, been improved.
You're always making it better.
>> Right. There's a couple of new things specifically for Build.
So we have a new offer which lets you
run Linux App Service apps for free.
That's something that wasn't there.
The cheapest you could get was our basic skew,
but now we have a free skew that people can go try out.
We also have the new VNet integration
in preview for both Linux and Windows,
with the ability to configure service endpoints on that VNet.
So it makes it very easy to lock down the environment so
that only stuff that's in
the VNet will be able to talk to your application.
>> I always assumed that VNet's were
an expensive thing that only like fancy companies need.
>> Yes. Usually, we only had it for App Service Environments,
where the barrier of entry was 1000 bucks a month, the cheapest.
>> That's a barrier.
>> Yes, indeed. But now
we're bringing it down to lower skews words.
It's basically a lot cheaper to just get started
and even have that lock down environment that people want.
>> That's great. Okay, cool.
I notice also that the portal has been changing.
When I go into the portal ordinarily, it's like blades,
right and some people really like the blades but
sometimes you're just trying to get started.
>> Right.
>> I want to be able to create an App Service as fast as possible.
I try to understand that you've actually read on that.
>> Yes, correct. So I
work specifically in the App Service UX team.
So we're responsible for both the web app and
the functions UI, and we're basically shipping every two weeks.
Hopefully people don't notice that we're doing this,
but every two weeks there's the new version of
the websites functions extension in production,
and one of the things that we've been doing is
moving that create experience to be full screen.
So this is something that we started with
App Service Environments then we did it for
App Service Plans and now for Build we have
a full screen GA of create web apps,
and that's basically the segue into our first demo.
>> Okay, cool. So let's bring up the screen and take a look
at our first demonstration.
>> So this is one of the new things that
they've been doing in the portal.
So now you have this home experience that lives very
fast and gives you the resources that you've been recently using.
As you can see on my Web App guide,
that is pretty much all I have over here.
But if I wanted to go create a new one,
that is where that create resource comes
in and you can just basically go right there into Web App,
and this is where the new experience comes in.
>> Okay, I'm used to it being a blade, and
then I jump out of the blade and I jump back,
and I go back and forth.
With all due respect, it was a little bit confusing.
>> Right, it's what we used to call journeys
and not everybody wants to go on
a vacation winter creating a web app, right?
So you should be able to just click,
click, click and be done with it.
So one of the things that you will see is that these "Basics" tabs
basically has everything that you need to create your app.
You have your "Subscription" and your "Resource Group".
The way that I talk about "Resource Groups" is
the folder where all of your stuff goes in.
So let's start going and create something here.
So I'm going to bk demo live.
>> Yes, I just think of "Resource Groups" as a dotted line around
your stuff and I want to
circle around my stuff so I can delete it all later.
>> Exactly.
>> As if I'm making demos.
>> Also, if you want to share it
with somebody else that's where you
set permissions to basically give somebody else access.
>> To the entire research group?
>> Right, then I'm going to give it a name,
App, and then the next thing that you need to
choose is basically, what are you publishing?
So are you pushing a bunch of
code or are you pushing a Docker image.
Not a lot of people know this but App Service supports both,
just your plain code or a Docker container,
or even a docker compose
multiple container scenario and it's very easy to go,
and just get started with that.
Then the other thing that we made is we've made
the "Runtime Stack" selection be upfront.
So when you're choosing a "Runtime Stack" and for example,
if you select something that is only
supported on a Linux instance,
you will only get a Linux instance.
If you select something that we support both on Windows or Linux.
You will see both Linux or Windows and we will make
a recommendation as to where we
think you're going to get the best experience.
For example, .NET Core 2.2, we recommend Windows.
There's another improvement that we've made.
Now, all of these lists are filterable, searchable.
So if you know exactly what you're looking for,
you can jump directly into that.
So for example, PHP 7.2,
you get to choose Linux or Windows but we recommend Linux.
For the sake of my demo.
I'm just doing .NET.
>> I see .NET Core 2.2,
but I kind of do some stuff with .NET Core three,
which is in preview and I don't see it there.
What's the best way to get something
strange or something unusual, or new?
>> Right, that is where Docker comes in and it makes it very easy,
because you can create your own Windows,
Linux image, whichever one you want,
putting whatever runtime you want.
Even you go into do go or .NET three point whatever,
the latest preview or even the one that you've
just built on your machine locally.
You can throw it in there and then run
it on an App Service and it gives you
that same familiar environment that you're already
used to from running one of our built-in images.
>> Cool.
>> The next thing is the" Location".
So where do you want to have this resource created,
and you and I have presented in Africa,
and now we also have
the South Africa regions available for App Service there.
>> Nice.
>> So if you want it to go create
something over there, you can do it.
>> That's actually a huge deal.
One of the things that's interesting about
global Internet systems like this is
you have to think about literally the speed of light.
>> Right.
>> When we were spending time in South Africa.
If you think about it, they were using I think
something in Ireland or somewhere in North Europe and it
was like a 300 millisecond to get from
southern Africa to northern Europe
and now they've got it in country.
>> Yes, the best thing about having a data center close to you,
is that you can put the app that your customers are
using really close to them and that makes
it so that you don't have to go through 17 network hops
just to get the first byte of your application back.
>> It's a huge difference.
>> All of this stuff that we've been talking about
is with relationship to your application.
But now, you need to choose where you're going to host that app,
as in how big of a machine you want,
how many instances, etc.
That is basically what the App Service plan defines.
As you can see here,
I can get started with the standard instance.
But I'm a little bit too zoomed in here.
But I can go into larger machines,
more power, more humph as I needed.
>> By the way, it's interesting that you point that out
because I'm used to running freeze,
basics, standards, my budget's about a 100 bucks a month.
I don't want to spend too much more.
But I didn't realize that App Service goes big.
Some of the premium skews 14,
15, 16 gigs of RAM on a single app service plan.
>> Exactly, and the biggest project that I have personally
participated in was the Canadian election sap that the CBC built,
we were running about four different aces.
>> Aces and App service environment.
>> Yeah, and they were
doing around one million requests per second,
all hosted on App Service.
>> Wow.
>> So you can go as small as
the free instance or as big as you want.
It really depends on your application
and who's going to be the target audience.
>> You can also do things with density.
I've got one medium right now and
I've got 16 or 17 websites in it,
and about 14 of them are trivial.
But there's no reason for me to make
a second App Service plan for such a small site.
So I've packed it in pretty tightly.
>> Exactly. You pay for the App Service plan.
You don't pay for the app.
So that makes it so that if you
have a right size App Service plan,
you can put a lot of applications in there.
So the next thing that you're going to see
is that we do have a monitoring tab.
This is basically where you can
configure Application insights for your application.
We recommend everybody that is running app service or
functions to definitely go Configure Application Insights.
It gets you a lot of rich monitoring for your application.
So you can see what's going on with your app,
what's going on with the dependencies,
if there's anything slowing down.
There's always a case where "Hey, my app is slow."
But is it my app or is it the SQL database behind
the scenes or something in networking that is mis-configured?
AI makes it very easy to you to pinpoint that.
>> Well and speaking your application insights.
If you don't mind, I might go a little bit off script.
But could you take a look at the dashboard that we created.
Because I was really impressed at how
quickly we could actually get a dashboard.
>> So for example over here.
This is a dashboard that basically got
generated for my application.
>> Right. So you went in. This is really interesting.
He went into Application Insights,
which is built-in and you just hit
"Yes" and he made the application,
and when he's sitting on the Application Insights page under
overview for the Application Insights. Here we go.
>> So you can see that I have AI configured for my app, right?
>> It's interesting when you say AI.
Because it feels like AI but it's Application Insights.
There's a star button that appears on there.
You have this now. If you go to
your Application Insights and instance,
and you hit this "Star" that says
application dashboard, that's okay.
>> It's right here.
>> You're in your Application Insights. Here it is.
It says App dashboard.
I didn't know what this did.
>> Right.
>> I just fell into it and I pushed that button, and I pushed it,
go ahead, and then it generated this dashboard.
What's cool about this is it's just totally configurable, right?
>> Right.
>> Right click and change this dashboard.
>> This is basically just going to get you started.
AI is a very feature-rich product.
They're so locked to it.
It's very hard to discover all
of the different things that they can do.
But this is definitely a good entryway into figuring out, "Hey,
what is all of this stuff that Application Insights gives you?"
>> Yeah. I went and added a bunch of other stuff.
I added billing, I added the things that matter to me,
and of course with Application Insights you can add a bunch of
custom things and those custom charts
and graphs can appear here as well.
>> Correct. Then going back to the Create experience.
So this is where you basically would
go and make sure that your app
is instrumented and created with AI from the start.
The next thing is tags.
Tags are really useful especially if you're
like an enterprising type of customer.
Because this tags that you can add to
your resources will flow all the way down to your bill.
So you can tell which resource is being used by for example,
what cost center or
which resource is costing you how much money based on your bill.
>> I see. That might sound like a small thing.
It might seem like even a very small feature,
but think about that for a second.
Right in the past,
I've been using poorly named, my fault,
poorly named resource groups,
infusingly named auto-generated web app names.
But I can go and tag them as like this is the R&D team,
this is the accounting team or whatever, and then like you said,
that tag goes all the way the bill.
So then I can go and check billing by tag,
and where tag is whatever your organization decides to use.
>> Correct. Then developers
also use it to add a little bit of metadata.
So if they want to share something
with multiple people using that app,
they can add it in the tag.
>> Yeah. I actually created a Minecraft Server recently and I
forgot a bunch of metadata and context and I did it in Azure.
It turns out that the ARM template,
the Azure Resource Manager or ARM template,
included like five or 10 different tags
with contexts that I needed.
>> The next step is review and create where we basically give you
a summary of what all it's going
to happen when we create this application.
This is also where all of the validation happens.
So we want to make sure that when you're at this point,
anything that would cause an error when you are deploying the app,
we would bubble it up and make it very easy
for you to not getting to errors.
The other cool thing about this full screen create experienced
is that it gives us room to grow.
So if we ever want to add a new feature or
something else that integrates nicely with this experience,
all we need to do is add
another tab and we would be part of the flow.
So at that point, I can go create
and within 30 seconds you're going to have an app ready to go.
>> So this is a new experience, it's out now though, right?
>> Correct. This is GA as of the beginning of built.
>> Okay. There's another new experience,
and it's the remaining two minutes that we can
take a look at, that I noticed right away.
Because I'm used to going to application settings,
to go and check on my App Setting,
but the configuration thing is new.
>> Yeah. One of the things that people find confusing that we have
something called App Settings, and then there
was App Settings within the App Settings.
So we renamed it to configuration,
which seems to make more sense.
>> Yeah.
>> Also most of the people come here,
they come specifically for App Setting.
So we made that the first choice that for you land
and one of the key features that we
added is this Advanced Edit feature.
>> This is huge.
Like we were actually in a meeting and someone thought of
this idea, and then he
pushed Advanced Settings and it was already there.
It was almost like, "Oh,
we should do this. That would be amazing."
I'm tired of pasting into textboxes.
What if I could just paste Jason and you fill
the textboxes out and you were like, there you go.
>> Yeah. So this is something that definitely people come in,
they want to edit more than one App Setting.
It was very tedious work.
>> Yeah.
>> We think this makes it a lot faster.
It makes it a lot easier to even copy paste and send it to
somebody else or if you want to copy from one app to another,
it makes it so that you can do that without
having to jump around hoops in the UI.
>> It's usually helpful for small sites that maybe
are too much hassle to do an ARM template.
But I do have a piece of configuration and if you're explaining to
someone in a document on GitHub,
here's the required configuration for your application,
paste this into advanced settings.
>> It makes it very easy.
That also is available for,
I don't have any connection strings.
But if you want to do it with connection strings,
you can also do it.
We support SQL, MySQL,
all of the different databases that are provided on
an Azure as well as all of the Table Storage.
>> So in the remaining few seconds,
what is available now? What is preview?
>> So available now is the configuration experience,
the new GA of fullscreen creates,
in preview is the vNet integration and
the service endpoints configuration on top of that vNet.
Also, GA is the free Linux tier.
>> Free Linux tier.
>> Yeah.
>> Fantastic. I am learning all about some of
the new features in App Service on Azure Friday live.
This is where you burst into spontaneous applause.
We'll be right back with more Azure Friday.
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