Deploying the ASP.NET Web API using Azure Websites

Microsoft Azure Websites is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering from Microsoft, which allows publishing web apps in Azure. The key focus when building Microsoft websites is to enable a true enterprise-ready PaaS service by allowing rapid deployment, better manageability, global scale at high throughput, and support for multiple platforms. The development of Azure Websites started about 3 years ago under the internal project name Antares with the primary intent to create a cheap and scalable web hosting framework for Microsoft Azure. The main target was shared and cross-platform hosting scenarios. The first preview release for Azure Websites came out in June 2012 and went General Availability (GA) in mid-2013.

Note

Azure Websites was recently renamed and is now part of Azure App Services. REST based service development is now referred to as API apps. For the scope of this book, we will focus on the existing service implementation. To learn...