Azure Content Spotlight – Deployment Slots for Azure Web Apps

Web Apps logoWelcome to another Azure Content Spotlight! These articles are used to highlight items in Azure that could be more visible to the Azure community.

For this post, I want to talk about Web Apps and Deployment Slots. If you are new to Azure, or have been around for a while, you might see references to Azure Websites or its newer name Azure Web Apps. This Azure feature allows you to host your website content in the cloud.

To find out more, view these links:

  • You can find a general introduction to Web Apps here.
  • To see what you can do with Web Apps, read Samir’s TechNet post on using Web Apps for URL Rewrites.

If you have critical content on a Web App but you want to roll out some changes – perhaps a new component or a complete website overhaul – you will want to test it first. This is where Deployment Slots are useful. You can deploy your changes to a staging slot for testing and then you can swap it into production confident it’s working. If the changes are not to your liking, you can roll back to your last known good state.

The following links have excellent content about Deployment Slots:

That should be enough links to get you started with this topic. If you find other information you think is useful, please post it in the comments.

by Ken Cenerelli (Twitter,  Blog,  Profile)