Yesterday Microsoft released the technical preview for their Windows 10 developer tools and now today a new back end service built on Microsoft Azure is announced to give developers the ability to deliver robust services through their apps on any platform.
Over at the official Microsoft blog today Bill Staples, the Corporate VP for App Platform and Microsoft Azure shared the details of this new service.
App Service is a one-of-a-kind cloud service which allows developers to easily build employee, partner and customer-facing apps for any platform or device. This solution integrates the Microsoft Azure Websites, Mobile Services and Biztalk Services into a single service with a common app hosting, runtime and extensibility model, enabling simplified integration with popular consumer and commercial services and on-premises systems.
Since the Azure App Service is built on Azure that means you have the means to scale your apps services to meet the demand in real time and not waste or lose money by having your app be stuck in one place and one hardware configuration.
There are four key areas that the Azure App Service can help developers build solid foundations for their apps:
- Web Apps – Web Apps, formerly Azure Websites, provide a robust set of Web app capabilities including support for the most popular Web development frameworks, such as .NET, Java, PHP, Python and more, and full DevOps support through continuous integration with Visual Studio Online, GitHub, Bitbucket and more. Web Apps enable enterprises to connect with existing apps and services on-premises through hybrid connectivity and AD integration while ensuring compliance, auditing and data retention requirements are met.
- Mobile Apps – Mobile Apps provides a rich set of backend capabilities for native Windows, iOS and Android mobile platforms as well as multi-platform environments like Xamarin and Cordova. Mobile apps make it easy to engage users with push notifications, authentication with popular identity providers including Active Directory, and store cloud data including offline sync.
- Logic Apps - Our new Logic Apps offering allows any technical user or developer the ability to automate process execution across popular consumer and commercial services as well as custom APIs on-premises to help solve even tricky integration scenarios with ease. Logic Apps also include our advanced set of Azure BizTalk service capabilities for even the most advanced enterprise integration scenarios.
- API Apps – also new, API Apps provide developers the ability to discover, host, and manage APIs including built-in support for enterprise systems such as SAP, Siebel and Oracle and popular services such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Dynamics CRM Online, Office 365 and many others. With API Apps, developers can select from a rich library of existing APIs as well as create their own APIs easily for private or public use.
Developers can already try out Azure App Services at http://tryappservice.azure.com and at 2 PM EDT today there will be an announcement from Scott Guthrie and the Azure team about the new service.
That event will be online at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-march-announcement/ and I am sure it will be full of demos and other info.
