ASP.NET core is the next generation development standard for the .NET world – may be that’s how I like to express it. Every ASP.NET Core application is a DNX (.NET Execution Environment) application.

When you create an ASP.NET Core application in Visual Studio (VS) 2015, it creates the project targeted at both the .NET Framework and .NET Core. You can see this under the frameworks section of the project.json file. Also the ASP.NET Core team recommends to leave this settings as it is. (Refer : https://docs.asp.net/) letting your application targets both the frameworks.

But in order to understand how things are deployed in the Azure App Service, I compiled an ASP.NET Core application and published it to an Azure Web App. Then I browsed the app with Kudu services and the Process Explorer looked like this, which shows ASP.NET Core app is running on DNX.

Under the Debug Console of the Kudu services in the following path site\approot\runtimes we can see the shipped .NET Core runtime, a feature which makes ASP.NET Core applications self-contained.

All these information are hidden from the developers and let them focus on the application development. So though the Visual Studio publishing model of the ASP.NET Core application is same as ASP.NET application publish model, based on the defined configurations Azure App Service hosts your web application under different runtimes.