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Helping you build better apps has been one of our key focus areas in Azure. Our latest tooling focuses on providing guidance for architecting, optimizing, and deploying apps. Whether you’re creating a new proof of concept or improving an existing app, these capabilities can boost productivity and performance. These capabilities are all in Preview, so please give them a try and let us know what you think!
Starting Right: Architecting Your Azure App
Let’s say you’re starting a proof of concept for a new application. Normally, you might spend a lot of time picking services, architecting apps, and deploying them based on industry best practices. Better Together can streamline this process with the below capabilities.
Better Together in Microsoft Copilot for Azure
The Better Together capability which can be accessed from Copilot can be helpful to understanding if you’re on the right track when building your app. In the past it might’ve been time-consuming to learn about the kinds of services that similar apps are using through docs and videos. This capability can streamline some of this process by recommending services based on patterns that other similar apps have used.
To give this a try, navigate to the Azure Portal and select the Copilot button in the toolbar to open the chat window. Here you can ask questions to recommended services for your app, or architecture, including, “What are popular services that are deployed with App Service apps like mine?” and “Which database should I use with my ACA app?”, and “What services would you recommend to implement distributed caching?”
Sometimes it’s important to validate if you’re on the right track. When you ask architectural or infrastructure-level questions to Azure Copilot, it helps you discover the most commonly used services for your specific use case. In the example below, after identifying performance bottlenecks in your app and considering implementing distributed caching to enhance performance, the recommendation points to Azure Cache for Redis. This service is widely deployed by many App Service apps similar to yours.
Boosting Performance: Optimizing Your Azure App
If your App Service app is running a little slower than expected, or if you’re suspecting any performance bottlenecks, these are some capabilities that can diagnose and optimize these problems.
Diagnostics Insights (Preview)
Diagnostic logs can return pages of information that are difficult to interpret. This capability can make it easier to identify anomalies and quickly identify bottlenecks . In the Azure Portal, you can efficiently evaluate your application’s CPU usage and track any anomalies by navigating to Diagnose & Solve Problems > Web App Slow. Within this section, you’ll find a chart that provides insights into performance and latency.
Notably, over the last 24 hours, approximately 90% of users accessing this web app experienced low latency.
Another way to access suggestions is to type in “my web app is slow” into Copilot for Azure, which will offer suggestions around any bottlenecks.
Diagnostic charts can sometimes be time-consuming to analyze. However, Copilot offers a helpful Summarization capability. When you input variations of “summarize this page,” Copilot will generate concise summaries of the insights, allowing you to quickly grasp the main points without having to read through every chart and detail.
Application Insights Code Optimizations (Preview)
Performance can be improved by making code-level changes. Code Optimizations helps identify where to make these improvements. By leveraging AI, Code Optimizations detects CPU and memory bottlenecks of your application during runtime. It is available for .NET applications that have Application Insights Profiler enabled. To access Code Optimizations in the Azure Portal, navigate to the Performance blade in Application Insights. For App Service, it’s also available in Diagnose & Solve Problems > Web App Slow.
In this example, some of the performance issues identified may be caused by inefficient code, which can be investigated.
Selecting any of these suggestions will open more details about the performance issue, show where and when in the code it’s occurring, and show the recommended solution.
For many recommendations, a code fix can be generated using the Code Optimizations extension (currently in limited preview) for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code – Insiders. You can sign up here.
Learn more about Code Optimizations.
Making Improvements: Augmenting Your Azure App
If you have deployed an App Service app and you’re unsure which services to use to improve scalability and reliability for it, these capabilities can help optimize without reinventing the wheel.
Better Together (Preview) in Azure Portal
It can be time-consuming to pick, create, deploy, and connect a service to your App Service app. Better Together can help you deploy and connect popular services for your App Service app. This capability primarily focuses on connecting newly-created resources to your App Service app more easily. Navigate to Better Together for your App Service app through the Azure Portal using the menu item Better Together.
Enabling Azure Cache for Redis will automatically create a new Redis instance and establish the connection with your existing App Service app. If you choose to “Create” any of the other services, you’ll be directed to their onboarding flow, where you’ll receive guidance on creating and connecting the service. Stay tuned for the next release for a more customized experience!
Take a look at these capabilities in action with the video below.
Conclusion: Better Together
Azure strives to empower you to create robust, high-performing apps. Whether you’re starting a new app or improving an existing one, we are creating tools and services that can help. Please give these capabilities a try and let us know what you think by leaving a comment or emailing us at bettertogetherteam@microsoft.com.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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