Page 44 - MSDN Magazine, April 2017

The New ASE
After the initial version of the ASE (which I’ll refer to as ASEv1) was released, there was substantial feedback from customers who tried it out and found that it didn’t fit their business needs for one reason or another. The primary reasons they gave concerned:
• The complexity of managing the ASEv1 roles, as well as their apps, was aggravating and non-intuitive.
• Adding more capacity to the ASE took too long. Because ASEv1 was built to be run by system administrators for their tenants, the concern had not been with how fast the roles were provisioned. The reality was that when ASEv1 was used, the person who scaled out the ASE roles and the one who deployed the app were typically one and the same and the delay was a problem.
• The system management model forced customers to be far more aware of the ASE architecture and behavior than they wanted to be.
This brings us to the new version of the ASE, which I’ll call ASEv2. The team took the feedback to heart and for ASEv2 we focused on making the UX the same as it was in the multi-tenant App Service, without losing the benefits that ASEv1 provided.
Creating an App Service Plan The App Service plan (ASP) is the scaling container that holds all apps. All apps are in ASPs and when you scale the ASP, you’re also scaling all of the apps in the ASP. This is true for the multi-tenant App Service and for the ASE. This means that to create an app you need to either choose or create an ASP. To create an ASP in ASEv1 you needed to pick an ASE as your location and then select a worker pool, as shown in
Figure 4 Creating an App Service Plan in ASEv2
Figure 3. If the worker pool you wanted to deploy into didn’t have enough capacity, you’d have to add more workers to it before you could create your ASP in it.
With ASEv2, when you create an ASP you still select the ASE as your location, but instead of picking a worker pool, you use the pricing cards just as you do outside of the ASE. There are no more worker pools to manage. When you cre- ate or scale your ASP, the necessary workers are automatically added.
ASEv2 includes upgraded VMs that are used to host your apps. The workers for ASEv2 are built on the Dv2-series VMs and out- perform the workers used in the multi-tenant app service. To dis- tinguish between ASPs that are in an ASE and those in the multi- tenant service, a new pricing SKU was created. The name of this SKU is Isolated, as shown in Figure 4. When you pick an Isolated SKU it means you want the associated ASP to be created in an ASEv2.
Creating an ASE One of the other issues that hindered ASE adoption was its lack of visibility. Many customers didn’t even know that the ASE feature existed. To create an ASE, you had to look for the ASE creation flow, which was completely separate from app cre- ation. In ASEv1 customers had to add workers to their worker pools in order to create ASPs. Now that workers are added automatically when ASPs are created or scaled,
Microsoft Azure
Figure 5 Creating an App Service Environment from the App Service Plan Creation Flow 32 msdn magazine