Azure WebApps- What's New: May 2024
Overview
A monthly look back on the new releases from the last month for the Microsoft Azure WebApp platform. I’m spending a great deal of my time working with WebApps, and hopefully this series will help both myself and others keep track of what’s new, what’s coming, and what’s going in the world of Azure App Services and Static Web Apps.
This month includes a number of announcements from Microsoft’s annual Build conference.
PHP 8.3 now available
The latest version of PHP, 8.3, is now a supported stack on Linux App Service plans. More information at azure.github.io
Azure Compute reservation Exchanges will remain available until further notice
Microsoft introduced “Azure savings plan for compute” back in October 2022 as an alternative to reserved instances. The plan at this point was to phase out the ability to change between instance series, or regions, using the Reserved Instance route by January 2024 and promote the Savings Plan as the alternative way of achieving these reduced costs.
This removal of the inter-series, inter-region part of the reservation exchange has been put on hold indefinitely. If/ when this does happen you will still be able to change the compute size within a series and also trade in any remaining reservations for savings plans.
This means there’s no change at the moment, but Azure users should consider the Savings Plan vs Reserved Instances options carefully for new deployments and any renewing Reserved Instances. More info on learn.microsoft.com
Windows gRPC Support for App Service now in Preview
Info
This feature is in Public Preview. Preview features let you try new functionality before it is released. This feature may have limited support from Microsoft, and could change if/when it becomes Generally Available (GA).
Support for the open source framework gRPC on Linux WebApps was released to General Availability at Microsoft Ignite last year. This preview brings that support to the Windows-based App Services.
More info via azure.microsoft.com
Static Web Apps Dedicated plan.
Info
This feature is in Public Preview. Preview features let you try new functionality before it is released. This feature may have limited support from Microsoft, and could change if/when it becomes Generally Available (GA).
It also offers more staging environments, capacity, and custom domains compared to the other plans- upping that specification to 2GB of storage from 500MB.
More details at learn.microsoft.com. The dedicated plan is free during the preview and is available in East US2, Central US, West US 2, East Asia regions.
.NET 7 (STS) End of Support
.NET 7 reached it’s end of support date on 14th May 2024, so any WebApps running that stack should be upgraded to .NET 8. See azure.microsoft.com for more information
Upcoming end of support dates
End of support dates for the following stacks have been announced.
| Stack | End Date | Link |
|---|---|---|
| App Service Environment v1/v2 | 31 August 2024 | techcommunity.microsoft.com |
| .NET 6 (LTS) | 12 November 2024 | azure.microsoft.com |
| PHP 8.1 | 25 November 2024 | azure.microsoft.com |
| NODE 18 (LTS) | 30 April 2025 | azure.microsoft.com |