We’re excited to announce the public preview of Azure App Configuration, a new service aimed at simplifying the management of application configuration and feature flighting for developers and IT. App Configuration provides a centralized place in Microsoft Azure for users to store all their application settings and feature flags (a.k.a., feature toggles), control their accesses and deliver the configuration data where it is needed.
Eliminate hard-to-troubleshoot errors across distributed applications
Companies throughout industries are transforming into digital organizations in order to better serve their customers, foster tighter relationships and respond to competition faster. We have witnessed a rapid growth in the numbers of applications our customers have. Modern applications, particularly those running in a cloud, are typically made up of multiple components and distributed in nature. Spreading configuration data across these components often leads to hard-to-troubleshoot errors in production. When a company has a large portfolio of applications, these problems multiply very quickly.
With App Configuration, you can keep your application settings together so that:
- You have a single consolidated view of all configuration data.
- You can easily make changes to settings, compare values, and perform rollbacks.
- You have numerous options to deliver these settings to your application, including injecting them directly into your compute service (e.g., App Service), embedding in a CI/CD pipeline, or retrieving them on-demand inside your code.
App Configuration allows you to maintain control over the configuration data and handle it with confidence.
Increase release velocity with feature flags
One of the core solutions we provide with App Configuration is feature management. Traditionally, a new application feature needs to go through a series of testing before it can be released. This generally leads to long development cycles. Newer software engineering methodologies, such as feature management using feature flags, help shorten the cycles by enabling real test in production while safeguarding the application stability. Feature management solves a multitude of developer challenges especially when building applications for the cloud.
App Configuration provides built-in support for feature management. You can leverage it to remotely control feature availability in your deployed application. While it can be used with any programming language, through its REST APIs, the .NET Core and ASP.NET Core libraries offer a complete end-to-end solution out of the box.
Get started now
App Configuration provides a complete turnkey solution for dealing with application settings and feature flags. It’s easy to onboard and use. You can find the complete documentation at, “Azure App Configuration Preview documentation.” Please give it a try and let us know what you think!