At Umbraco US Festival I heard a lot of devs talking about hosting their Umbraco sites on Azure App Services. We're currently hosting over 100 websites on a VM in Azure. Was wondering if anyone here could speak to the pros/cons of Azure VM vs Azure App Services. I looked at the pricing and I just don't see how you come out ahead with App Services, but maybe I'm missing something.

I'm not aware of the price difference between Azure VMs and App Services, but for me it's not about the extra cost, it's more about what I don't have to worry about. For example, I am more than happy not to have to worry about applying updates. I know that's a bit of an oversimplification, but I think for a lot of people it's about what they don't have to deal with other than getting the lowest price.

Are you hosting over 100 Umbraco websites on a VM in Azure? Pricing is definitely the con for Azure managed resource vs VMs. We use Azure VMs for some stuff that is ridiculously overpriced as a SaaS/managed service. But not web apps. The pros are the Azure infrastructure, deployment slots, managed configuration including key vaults, easy CDN setup, Azure Front Door firewalls, automatic https certificates, and better Azure DevOps pipelines integration. And for load-balanced Umbraco setups, Azure App Services enables frontend scaleout and scaleup in a way that's very hard for a VM.

@kdx-perbol to answer your question we have ~100 Umbraco sites (technically). We maintain a staging and production version of every website so ~50 prod and ~50 staging. With another ~20 non-Umbraco sites on top of that. Something else I saw at US Fest was Umb multi-site configuration, and I've been chatting with Jen Wolke (that spoke about multi-site) about her setup and she was telling me they run their muti-site on App Services...I can't really wrap my head around the IIS portion of muti-site on a VM. All that to say I'm curious about Azure App Services, but price could be the killer.

You mean multi-site on a single Umbraco database? That sounds like it would work exactly the same regardless of how Umbraco is hosted. Maybe the scaling and multiple-domains stuff is easier on Azure App Services. It's the Azure App Plan (the IIS machine) that incurs a cost, and I'm sure there's an overhead with Azure App Services compared to pure IIS sites, so 100 sites on the same plan/VM would surely require a sizier Azure App Plan than it would a VM. A single Azure App Plan that can run 100 Umbraco single-instance installations looks like it would cost USD~700/month according to the Azure Pricing Calculator. We use Azure App Service Deployment Slots for staging environments, which is also very convenient compared to good old IIS sites.

We hosted 40+ sites (each with dev and staging) on Azure web apps - some were multi-site as well. Prior to that we hosted on Rackspace on a dedicated server. The benefit with Azure Web Apps is for us was Deployment Slots = No downtime. We could do heavy development, swap databases, do testing with the client and seamlessly go live and back again without so much as a blip. However, pricewise we spent £800 a month with Rackspace and £800 a month with Azure. To be fair Azure itself was cheap but £5 per SQL DB mounts up.

We use Azure SQL Server VMs for SQL. Azure has a "managed" SQL Server VM resource, so it's not "just a VM with SQL Server". So the cost is 95% from the App Service Plans and 5% is VMs, CDN, Storage, FrontDoor, Virtual Networks, Redis, and other crap. @Dean Leigh that was 40+ (technically 80+? A Slot is "just an app") sites on App Service Plans? Or just one App Service Plan? Or no Plans (is that even possible)?

Around 20 sites per app service plan and one client on their own plan for compliance reasons.

Personally, I'd say some unexpected upsides of Azure App Services are * No more complex ps1s/cmds/etc to manage IIS sites and IIS app pools, that never worked 100% anyway because of Windows Server differences * No more

ICACLS

* No more

inetmgr

* No more IIS/Windows Certificate Wizard * No more "why is the MSDeploy AXD not working"