CODEWITHSUNDEEP
azuretestingdevops
Toby Holland
Toby Holland

Reputation: 1069

Options or setting up a test environment in Azure

I have an app service running on Azure with an associated SQL server DB.

I would like to create a test environment for the project.

I looked at a few Azure Dev/Test tutorials but they are for setting up VMs and I couldn't see anything indicating it can be used for a app service.

Is my only option to duplicate the appservice, db, ssl certs, custom domains and effectively double my azure bill?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 1534

Answers (2)

Rob Reagan
Rob Reagan

Reputation: 7686

Bruno gave good advice, but here's a few more things to consider.

If you use deployment slots, you are sharing your Web App CPU and memory between all slots. If something goes horribly wrong with a test build that's deployed to a slot on your production machine, your production environment can end up resource starved. I personally don't recommend using slots for testing for this reason. Slots are more for smoke testing/warming up a build that you're about to swap into your production slot.

If you want to save money yet still have the benefit of separate environments, consider looking into ARM templates. ARM templates let you script the provisioning of Azure resources. You can create ARM templates based on your production environment, including scripting the App Settings section of your Web App to hold test configuration settings. You can then deploy your ARM template that spins up a test environment right from a Visual Studio project. If you put all of your test resources into the same resource group, tearing down your test environment is a few mouse clicks to delete the test resource group.

Upvotes: 4

Bruno Faria
Bruno Faria

Reputation: 5272

For the App Service, you have something called Slots. This allows you to have multiple environments on the same App Service. You can also have multiple Web Apps under the same App Service Plan as well instead of using Slots, so in this case, you only pay for 1 backend. App Service has a Free Tier, but with limitations such as not supporting custom domains.

Set up staging environments in Azure App Service

For SQL Databases you have to pay for each DB or use Elastic Pools (1 backend for multiple DBs) but that's only worth when you're using at least 100DTUs DBs. The minimum database you can have is the Basic one, but that's $6/month.

Upvotes: 4

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