How to Avoid Azure App Service Plans to Scale Down Automatically

Question

I would like to ask you if there is a way to avoid App Service Plans from Azure to scale down automatically. For instance, I configured an App Service Plan with the following pricing tier: Basic: 1 Medium; nevertheless, if my app is idle for some time the pricing tier of that App Service Plan changes to Shared. I do not know if that is a standard behavior, financially it makes sense; however, from a technical point of view, I do need at least a Basic Service Plan at all times since I am using some GDI+ features not available in a shared environment (where in fact my app starts crashing).

While in developing, creating and deploying directly web apps from within Visual Studio, and later scaling the app to a Basic Service Plan never changed back to Free set by default... But now in production using a Pay-As-You-Go subscription I am having this problem, that now is becoming very annoying.

I hope that anyone may help me figure out how to avoid the behavior stated earlier, in order to force my App Service Plan to remain in at least a Basic pricing tier, even while my app is idle; or in this case, at least force my App Service Plan to scale up from Shared to Basic once the app is not idle anymore.

Answer 1

I had the same problem. I configured an App Service Plan with the following pricing tier: Standard: 1 Small; but, for some reason, the pricing tier of that App Service Plan changes to Shared. I was using a Pay-As-You-Go subscription without spent limit!!

To solve the problem, I had to create a new subscription (Pay-As-You-Go), change the App Plan Service for the new subscription and, finally, scale up to new pricing tier.

Answer 2

Changes to the App Plan are not automatic. Someone is doing them. Look into your Azure Operation logs and I bet you'll find the culprit. Or maybe you have a limit on the spend in your Azure account and it converts everything to free plan once that cap runs out?