Jeff Sanders Technical Blog

I am a Microsoft employee that has worked on all aspects of the Web Stack for a long time. I hope these blogs are useful to you! Use this information at your own risk.


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Azure App Services Paas Notes

- 29 Nov 2021

People moving from an on-premise to Cloud implementation sometimes have difficulty understanding they do not have control over the underlying platform updates to their PaaS resources.  Azure App Services is a Platform as a Service (PaaS).  Simply put, a PaaS service gives you a platform to host your code and the provider updates the platform whenever necessary.  You cannot control when the underlying platform gets updated nor what gets updated.  You rely on the provider of the platform to handle security and platform updates and trust that the platform simply will work.  There are many advantages to a PaaS environment that I will not cover here.  We have learning resources that cover all the basics of Azure here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/az-900-describe-cloud-concepts/

Details

What is PaaS?  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-paas/.

How to choose between different architectures? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/technology-choices/compute-decision-tree#understand-the-hosting-models

How does the OS and runtime get patched for App Services?  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/overview-patch-os-runtime

Demystifying the magic behind App Service OS updates: Demystifying the magic behind App-Service OS updates

So what if you don’t want someone else to manage your platform?  Consider IaaS instead where you have more control:  What is IaaS? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-iaas/

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Final Note

It may seem scary for someone to manage your Platform but it relieves you from the worry and overhead of being up to date.  You can even use custom containers on the PaaS platform if you wish to encapsulate a certain environment as a container.  Be sure to reach out to Microsoft if you have any other questions about this!

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