In September, 2016 we announced the preview of Azure App Service on Linux making it easier for PHP and Node.js developers to run their web applications natively on Linux and thus making it easier to work directly with .htaccess files or avoid using modified extensions or code.

App Service provides a fully managed experience for web and mobile developers so they can quickly create applications and services for their business without having to focus resources on the day to day management of the web server and operating system. This includes streamlined deployment abilities with deployment slots, custom domains, SSL configuration, continuous deployment and horizontal and vertical scaling.

Today, we are building on the management ease and agility of App Service on Linux by enabling developers to bring their own Docker formatted container images and extending support to ASP.NET Core.

Bring your own Docker formatted container

App Service provides default Linux containers for versions of Node.js, PHP and ASP.NET Core that make it easy to quickly get up and running on the service. With our new container support, developers can now create customized containers based on the defaults. For example, developers could create a container with specific builds of Node.js and pm2 that differ from the default versions provided by the service. This enables developers to use new or experimental framework versions that are not available in the default containers. Developers can upload their containers to the Azure Container Registry, Docker Hub, or a private container registry.

ASP.NET Core Support

ASP.NET Core is a lean and composable framework for building web and cloud applications. ASP.NET Core is fully open source and available on GitHub. ASP.NET Core is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. App Service today introduces a new base container image to support ASP.NET core. This now gives developers the flexibility to run ASP.NET core on App Service on Windows and Linux. The main advantage of running it on the Linux option is that you can deploy to App Service using containers.

deploy them in containers to Azure App Service.

Getting started

To get started, sign in or start a free trial and create an App Service instance. More information available in the App Service documentation. We would love to hear your feedback on this preview so please visit https://feedback.azure.com/ to get it in the hands of our team.