Azure Web Apps is a component of Azure App Service. Developers love Web Apps as this is very simple web server as a service model. Often people ask the question, what is the difference between VMs Cloud Services and Web Apps. I think this post explains the difference in greater details.

Accessing KUDU

Azure Web Apps run on Kudu, an open source engine which is responsible for the management and operation of the Azure Web Service.

You can reach the Kudu environment of your azure web app by simply modifying your URL, example : I have this following site to manage the Azure Key Vault (in dev environments) https://keyvaultmanager.azurewebsites.net/ in order to access the Kudu environment of this site, simple add the .scm part after the web app name part of the URL. Something like this https://keyvaultmanager.scm.azurewebsites.net/

You should be logged in to the Azure Portal in order for this to work. You can configure many settings in the KUDU. You can also access KUDU using the Azure Preview Portal under the Tools section of your web application.

Server Affinity

Web Apps by default has Server Affinity enabled, meaning that the Web Apps service will direct your requests to the same server in the scaled environments. You can leverage the advantages of local in-memory session states. Please not that modern cloud application design principals do not recommend you use local session states, instead they promote the centralized session management.

However, Web Apps having Server Affinity enabled by default is an out of the box feature of the Web Apps.

You can simply set the value to false to disable the server affinity. You can access the above template of your web app using Azure Resource Explorer in the Azure Preview Portal.

If you want a simpler solution add this in your Web App’s App Settings section – clientAffinityEnabled = false

Live Monitoring

This is a great management tool for the production Web Apps. Azure Web Apps enables you to monitor your app live with very low latency monitoring. It also provides a comprehensive log of your application.

You can access from the Azure Preview Portal, under the Tools section of your Web App and click on the Troubleshoot option. The click Live HTTP Traffic

Auto Healing

You can reach this option, using Azure Preview Portal. Click on Tools section of your web app, click on Troubleshoot option and then click Mitigate.

In this option you get to set an alert or logging rule, but the interesting part is that you can enable an recycle rule of your web app. So when a condition is met your web app will be recycled (in IIS application pool will be restarted).

Above I have set a rule to recycle the web app every time if receives 100 requests in 10 seconds. You can add more sophisticated rules and chain them together.