11/3 update: Some pricing page changes will be delayed this week. All changes should be reflected by 11/9.
Digital demand for goods, services and information has never been higher and organizations of all sizes are bringing their web applications to the cloud to save costs and better support remote employees, customers, and partners.
As this demand grows, many of our customers have found that their current infrastructure is either limited in capacity or lacks the agility to keep pace with changing user needs. Premera Blue Cross is using App Service to simplify operations for Premera.com and protect patient data. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences migrated their apps to Azure to rationalize legacy infrastructure costs and create new experiences for their members. And City National Bank needed modern CI/CD tools to make their development processes more predictable, automated and repeatable.
“Nobody understands .NET and SQL Server better than Microsoft, which, through Azure, gave us a robust set of managed services for migrating our legacy applications to the cloud.”
Bev Kite, Chief Information Officer, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
As the steward of Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET and Visual Studio for the past two decades, Microsoft has built best in class application development environments in Azure for ASP.NET web apps and SQL databases. In fact, App Service and Azure SQL were recently benchmarked by GigaOm as the most cost effective and performant environments to run ASP.NET web workloads.
Today, we’re announcing several major investments in App Service designed to make it easier and more cost effective to migrate and modernize your .NET web apps with Azure.
Our most performant, cost effective offerings ever
Starting October 1st, customers will be able to use our updated Premium v3 (Pv3) offering, which leverages the latest Azure Dv4 Virtual Machine (VM) hardware to deliver improved performance and scalability.
New 2,4, and 8 vCore options stretch up to 32 GBs of memory. These new, more powerful configurations can handle more apps per instance and better support the large, enterprise applications and content management systems our customers use to run their most critical operations. With more competitive price points for dev/test and production workloads, Premium v3 is our most cost-effective and performant offering ever.
With Premium v3, our support for Windows Containers also becomes Generally Available, making it possible for a variety of .NET applications with legacy configurations - including apps using COM+, GAC and those with custom OS level dependencies, as well as many WCF services - to migrate to Azure App Service. And for the first time on App Service we are introducing Reservations Pricing to help customers control their TCO and better manage costs.
Starting November 1st, customers can save up to 35 percent with a 1-year commitment and up to 55 percent for a 3-year commitment, compared to pay as you go prices. We are also extending our dev/test pricing discounts to Premium v3 as well as Premium v2, making it more affordable (especially for Visual Studio subscribers) to test workloads that require VNet connectivity before deploying.
Cost savings and networking innovation for Isolated workloads
For customers in regulated industries, our App Service Environments (ASE) provide an isolated environment to run their most sensitive web workloads. After several years of infrastructure and networking investments, we pleased to share that our App Service Environment v3 (ASEv3) will be available in Public Preview on November 1st.
This new single tenant architecture, built on Virtual Machine Scale Sets, places customer application endpoints in the customer's virtual network, while the internal ASE infrastructure is deployed in a separate, Azure controlled network.
This approach eliminates any ASE management traffic in the customer's network and vastly simplifies the deployment experience. This new ASE will be available as part of our Isolated v2 App Service plan, with no per instance stamp fee, offering an 80% reduction in deployment costs compared to Isolated v1.
Modernizing with .NET 5
Microsoft's commitment to .NET extends to the cloud and beyond. We're continuing to invest in the open source .NET platform to provide experiences for building across operating systems and devices. Today, the .NET 5 Release Candidate is available with a Go-live license so you are supported in production. This release continues the journey to unify the platform across web, cloud, desktop, mobile, IoT, machine learning & AI.
In particular, this release focuses on making .NET the most productive platform for building high-performance microservices and container-based applications with the introduction of single file applications, smaller container images, and smaller memory footprint. It adds support for Windows ARM64, contains significant runtime performance improvements, and includes new C# 9.0 & F# 5.0 language features.
The ASP.NET Core web stack also has many additional enhancements for building modern web applications and services, including integrated Azure Active Directory authentication with Microsoft.Identity.Web, Blazor enhancements like CSS isolation for Blazor components, protected browser storage, and lazy loading in Blazor WebAssembly for improved load times. Blazor is also now supported in Azure App Service Static Web Apps.
You can learn more about the release on the .NET Team blog.
Get started today with the Azure Migration and Modernization Program
Azure is the home for .NET apps. With free and easy to use migration assistants for App Service and Azure SQL and new streamlined resources available through the Azure Migration and Modernization Program, it has never been easier to save costs and begin your modernization journey!
**Note: App Service Premium Monthly Cost chart updated 10/12/20 to reflect the correct reservation prices for US East. Premium v3 not available in all regions, check the Azure Pricing Calculator for regional availability and exact pricing.