Building successful apps is a continuous delivery and constant process, with focus on speed to market and evolution. This requires making successful decisions based on user behaviour and habits. Application Insights for Visual Studio Online gives you a great insight into how, when and where your website is used.
Application Insights allows you to find performance issues earlier, diagnose crashes faster, and get smarter about your users with a 360° view of your apps and services. Using this Visual Studio Online service, allows you to manage your website smoothly in the cloud.
Visual Studio Online is the online version of Team Foundation Server (TFS). They are both are complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools. The difference is that the Visual Studio Online is completely managed in the cloud by Microsoft. It brings all the capabilities of working in the cloud right to your fingertips. A single account creation lets you benefit from the cloud computing features while keeping your application development costs to a minimal.
Today’s application development involves cross -platform, multi-language with various features and developer needs. Visual Studio Online lets your development team to access the tools and services offered by the Azure cloud, while you concentrate on the development. Microsoft will manage the servers and do the backups for you automatically.Using the Visual Studio Online, you can create any number of projects and manage them online.
With Azure, there are multiple ways to host websites – Azure Website, Cloud services and Virtual Machines.
For most web apps, Azure Websites have been the best choice. Deployment and management are integrated into the platform, sites can scale quickly to handle high traffic loads, and the built in load balancing and traffic manager provide high availability. You can easily move existing sites to Azure websites easily with an online migrating tool or create a new site using the framework and tools of your choice.
If you need more control over the web server environment, such as the ability to remote into your server or configure server startup tasks, Azure Cloud Services is typically the best option.
If you have an existing application that would require substantial modifications to run in Azure Websites or Azure Cloud Services, you could choose Azure Virtual Machines in order to simplify migrating to the cloud. However, correctly configuring, securing, and maintaining VMs requires much more time and IT expertise compared to Azure Websites and Cloud Services.
If you are considering Azure Virtual Machines, make sure you take into account the ongoing maintenance effort required to patch, update, and manage your VM environment.
The following diagram illustrates the relative degree of control versus ease of use for each of these web hosting options on Azure.
