When you need to host a website on Azure, there are lots of potential choices. If it’s a static website that doesn’t require any interactions with users, then you can just store your website in Azure Storage and serve it from there. If you need to host something more sophisticated, then you could deploy it on an Azure virtual machine that’s running a content management system, such as WordPress. If you’ve built a microservices-based application in Docker containers, then you could run it on Azure Kubernetes Service.

But the most popular way to do it is to use Azure App Service. Why? Well, because App Service tries to make deploying a web application as easy as possible while still providing lots of flexibility and features. It’s considered to be a platform-as-a-service rather than infrastructure-as-a-service because it manages the underlying infrastructure for you. This means you don’t have to worry about things like patching the operating system.

App Service supports a wide variety of programming languages and frameworks, including ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, Java, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, and Python. Not only do these come preinstalled, but they’re also updated when new patches or releases are available. For most of these frameworks, you can choose whether to run it on Windows or Linux (although that’s not the case with ASP.NET Framework 4.8, which can only run on Windows).

Even if you want to use a different programming language, you can still use App Service if you put your application in a Docker container that has the right dependencies installed in it.

There are other key development and deployment features, too. First, it’s well-integrated with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, which are the preferred programming environments for many software developers. It’s also integrated with continuous integration / continuous delivery tools, such as Azure DevOps, GitHub, and BitBucket. You can also use App Service to host mobile backends and application programming interfaces.

Aside from the ease of deployment and maintenance, one of the biggest advantages of using App Service is its enterprise-class features. First, there’s high availability. Microsoft guarantees 99.95% uptime in most cases for apps running on this service. Then there’s scalability. You can configure it to automatically add more resources to your application when demand increases.

Of course, security is important, too, so Microsoft provides authentication capabilities if you only want authorized users to be able to access your apps. It also lets you control which IP addresses are allowed or denied access to your site if you want.

There are other features as well, but this should give you a good idea of why App Service is the preferred choice for hosting web apps on Azure.