In chapter 2, you created a virtual machine (VM) and manually installed packages to run a basic web server. You could build an online pizza store with this VM if you were hungry to get started. One of the biggest use cases for Azure VMs is to run web applications, typically at scale. Web applications are a comfortable workload for VMs. Comfortable is nice, if you also like the maintenance that goes with managing all those VMs--you know, fun things like software updates, security patches, centralized logging, and compliance reports. What if you could get all the power of a secure web server to run your web applications, including the ability to automatically scale to meet demands, but without the need to create and manage all those VMs? Let me introduce you to the Azure Web Apps service.
In this chapter, we’ll compare the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach of VMs and web servers to the Platform as a Service (PaaS) approach. You’ll learn the benefits of Azure Web Apps as you create a web application and see how to work with its development and production releases. Then you’ll learn how to deploy your web app automatically from a source control, such as GitHub. This workflow is shown in figure 3.1. Azure Web Apps allows you to deploy and run your online pizza store in a matter of minutes, without the need to install and configure a VM and web-server packages.