Let's start by creating a new App Service Plan. Similar to all Azure resources, we need to provide a name, Subscription, Resource Group, and Location. The other options available are Operating System and Pricing tier. The options available for OS are Windows and Linux. An example of all the information needed to create a new App Service Plan is shown in the following screenshot:
The default value for App Service Plan Pricing tier is S1 Standard or Standard 1. If we change this value, a new blade will open with more options. The App Service Plan pricing blade is shown in the following screenshot:
App Service Plan pricing is divided into three sections:
- Dev/Test
- Production
- Isolated
Dev/Test is intended for small workloads in dev/test environments. It has different sizes: F1, D1, and Basic (B1, B2, and B3). F1 is free on shared infrstructure, has limited compute time per day, and doesn't support custom domains. D1 has more compute hours per day and support for custom domains. The Basic tier has dedicated infrastructure and has support for custom domains, SSL, and manual scaling.
Production is intended for bigger workloads in a production environment. It comes with Standard and Premium tiers, which each have additional sizes (S1, S2, S3, P1, P2, P3, P1v2, P2v2, and P3v2). All sizes in the production section bring additional features, like autoscale, slots, backup, and Traffic Manager support. The amount of resources available to an App Service Plan depends on size, as each size comes with a different amount of memory and number of cores. This also applies to the Basic tier, even though it's not intended for production. The main difference between the standard and premium tiers is disk type, as standard uses standard storage (HDD) and premium uses premium storage (SSD). Premium can also be v1 and v2, where v2 has a different processor type and more memory.
After an App Service Plan is created, you can start adding Web Apps. It's important to say that you can add multiple Web Apps to a single App Service Plan. Billing is done on the App Service Plan level and you pay for the entire App Service Plan, not for each individual app. The number of apps that can be added to each App Service Plan depends on tier and size.