App Service Environment overview

An App Service Environment is an Azure App Service feature that provides a fully isolated and dedicated environment for running App Service apps securely at high scale. Unlike the App Service public multitenant offering where supporting infrastructure is shared, with App Service Environment, compute is dedicated to a single customer. For more information on the differences between App Service Environment and App Service public multitenant, see the comparison of the offerings.

An App Service Environment can host your:

• Windows web apps
• Linux web apps
• Docker containers (Windows and Linux)
• Functions
• Logic apps (Standard) - in supported regions

App Service Environments are appropriate for application workloads that require:

• High scale.
• Isolation and secure network access.
• High memory utilization.
• High requests per second (RPS). You can create multiple App Service Environments in a single Azure region or across multiple Azure regions. This flexibility makes an App Service Environment ideal for horizontally scaling stateless applications with a high RPS requirement.

An App Service Environment can host applications from only one customer, and they do so on one of their virtual networks. Customers have fine-grained control over inbound and outbound application network traffic. Applications can establish high-speed secure connections over VPNs to on-premises corporate resources.

Usage scenarios

App Service Environments have many use cases, including:

• Internal line-of-business applications.
• Applications that need more than 30 App Service plan instances.
• Single-tenant systems to satisfy internal compliance or security requirements.
• Network-isolated application hosting.
• Multi-tier applications.

There are many networking features that enable apps in a multi-tenant App Service to reach network-isolated resources or become network-isolated themselves. These features are enabled at the application level. With an App Service Environment, no added configuration is required for the apps to be on a virtual network. The apps are deployed into a network-isolated environment that's already on a virtual network. If you really need a complete isolation story, you can also deploy your App Service Environment onto dedicated hardware.

Dedicated environment

An App Service Environment is a single-tenant deployment of Azure App Service that runs on your virtual network.

Applications are hosted in App Service plans, which are created in an App Service Environment. An App Service plan is essentially a provisioning profile for an application host. As you scale out your App Service plan, you create more application hosts with all the apps in that App Service plan on each host. A single App Service Environment v3 can have up to 200 total App Service plan instances across all the App Service plans combined. A single App Service Isolated v2 (Iv2) plan can have up to 100 instances by itself.

When you're deploying onto dedicated hardware (hosts), you're limited in scaling across all App Service plans to the number of cores in this type of environment. An App Service Environment that's deployed on dedicated hosts has 132 vCores available. I1v2 uses two vCores, I2v2 uses four vCores, and I3v2 uses eight vCores per instance. Only I1v2, I2v2 and I3v2 SKU sizes are available on App Service Environment deployed on dedicated hosts.

Virtual network support

The App Service Environment feature is a deployment of Azure App Service into a single subnet on a virtual network. When you deploy an app into an App Service Environment, the app is exposed on the inbound address that's assigned to the App Service Environment. If your App Service Environment is deployed with an internal virtual IP (VIP) address, the inbound address for all the apps will be an address in the App Service Environment subnet. If your App Service Environment is deployed with an external VIP address, the inbound address will be an internet-addressable address, and your apps will be in a public Domain Name System.

The number of addresses that are used by an App Service Environment v3 in its subnet will vary, depending on the number of instances and the amount of traffic. Some infrastructure roles are automatically scaled, depending on the number of App Service plans and the load. The recommended size for your App Service Environment v3 subnet is a /24 Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block with 256 addresses in it, because that size can host an App Service Environment v3 that's scaled out to its limit.

The apps in an App Service Environment don't need any features enabled to access resources on the same virtual network that the App Service Environment is in. If the App Service Environment virtual network is connected to another network, the apps in the App Service Environment can access resources in those extended networks. Traffic can be blocked by user configuration on the network.

The multi-tenant version of Azure App Service contains numerous features to enable your apps to connect to your various networks. With those networking features, your apps can act as though they're deployed on a virtual network. The apps in an App Service Environment v3 don't need any added configuration to be on the virtual network.

A benefit of using an App Service Environment instead of a multi-tenant service is that any network access controls for the App Service Environment-hosted apps are external to the application configuration. With the apps in the multi-tenant service, you must enable the features on an app-by-app basis and use role-based access control or a policy to prevent any configuration changes.

Feature differences

App Service Environment v3 differs from earlier versions in the following ways:

• There are no networking dependencies on the customer's virtual network. You can secure all inbound and outbound traffic and route outbound traffic as you want.
• You can deploy an App Service Environment v3 that's enabled for zone redundancy. You set zone redundancy only during creation and only in regions where all App Service Environment v3 dependencies are zone redundant. In this case, each App Service Plan on the App Service Environment will need to have a minimum of three instances so that they can be spread across zones. For more information, see Migrate App Service Environment to availability zone support.
• You can deploy an App Service Environment v3 on a dedicated host group. Host group deployments aren't zone redundant.
• Scaling is much faster than with an App Service Environment v2. Although scaling still isn't immediate, as in the multi-tenant service, it's a lot faster.
• Front-end scaling adjustments are no longer required. App Service Environment v3 front ends automatically scale to meet your needs and are deployed on better hosts.
• Scaling no longer blocks other scale operations within the App Service Environment v3. Only one scale operation can be in effect for a combination of OS and size. For example, while your Windows small App Service plan is scaling, you could kick off a scale operation to run at the same time on a Windows medium or anything else other than Windows small.
• You can reach apps in an internal-VIP App Service Environment v3 across global peering. Such access wasn't possible in earlier versions.

A few features that were available in earlier versions of App Service Environment aren't available in App Service Environment v3. For example, you can no longer do the following:

• Perform a backup and restore operation on a storage account behind a firewall.
• Access the FTPS endpoint using a custom domain suffix.

Pricing

With App Service Environment v3, the pricing model varies depending on the type of App Service Environment deployment you have. The three pricing models are:

• App Service Environment v3: If the App Service Environment is empty, there's a charge as though you have one instance of Windows I1v2. The one instance charge isn't an additive charge but is applied only if the App Service Environment is empty.
• Zone redundant App Service Environment v3: There's a minimum charge of 18 cores. There's no added charge for availability zone support if you have 18 or more cores across your App Service plan instances. If you have fewer than 18 cores across your App Service plans in the zone redundant App Service Environment, the difference between 18 cores and the sum of the cores from the running instance count is charged as additional Windows I1v2 instances.
• Dedicated host App Service Environment v3: With a dedicated host deployment, you're charged for two dedicated hosts per our pricing when you create the App Service Environment v3 and then, as you scale, you're charged a specialized Isolated v2 rate per vCore. I1v2 uses two vCores, I2v2 uses four vCores, and I3v2 uses eight vCores per instance.

Reserved Instance pricing for Isolated v2 is available and is described in How reservation discounts apply to Azure App Service. The pricing, along with Reserved Instance pricing, is available at App Service pricing under the Isolated v2 plan.

Regions

App Service Environment v3 is available in the following regions:

Azure Public:

* Limited availability and no support for dedicated host deployments.
** To learn more about availability zones and available services support in these regions, contact your Microsoft sales or customer representative.

Azure Government:

Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet:

In-region data residency

An App Service Environment will only store customer data including app content, settings and secrets within the region where it's deployed. All data is guaranteed to remain in the region. For more information, see Data residency in Azure.

App Service Environment v2

App Service Environment has three versions: App Service Environment v1, App Service Environment v2, and App Service Environment v3. The information in this article is based on App Service Environment v3. To learn more about App Service Environment v2, see App Service Environment v2 introduction.

Next steps