Posted by At this point of the Azure Continuous Delivery tutorial, you should have Team Services set up and linked to both Visual Studio and Azure. If this is not the case, you can go back to Part 1 HERE. Otherwise, proceeding with Part 2, we will be setting up the Azure App Services as a multi-environment solution.
Due to the fact that we have Visual Studio integrated with Azure, deploying our app service is a breeze. You start by right clicking the project and select “Publish”, then selecting Microsoft Azure App Service as the publish target. It should automatically use your Microsoft account to find your Azure subscription.
From there, you should create a Resource group, if you haven’t already (Resource groups are simply for grouping resources together to provide a common goal, eg, a website). This resource group will house our multi-environment solution. Additionally, you will also need to create a new App Service Plan, if you haven’t already. App Service Plans are effectively the details of how your App Service should run, from location to pricing tier to scale (more details can be found HERE). Name your App Service however you wish, and hit create.
Now that we have an App Service on Azure, we will need to replicate that instance, as a precursor to setting up the multiple environments. There are two ways to do this, one being a bit more expensive but is easy, the other being more of a work around. The easy, expensive way is to go to the App Service in the Azure portal, scroll about halfway down to “Development tools” and selecting Clone app. The reason why this is expensive is that as of today (1/31/2017), the Clone app feature is only available to Premium service tiers, which are estimated to cost around $200/month.
The alternative work around is to simply go through Visual Studio, and republish the same project under a slightly different name (I’d advise the same name with the environment attached, so instead of “ContinuousDelivery”, you’d put “ContinuousDeliveryTest” instead. This helps keep track of which environment is which). By republishing, the new App Service should be set up just like the original.
Now, when we go into the Resource group we created, we should have multiple App Services and our App Service Plan, all together and ready to be configured for Continuous Delivery across each service. This will be covered in Part 3 – Build and Deploy definitions, coming soon.