Recently, we announced the Azure App Service which is a one-of-a kind cloud service that enables developers to build intelligent web and mobile apps for any platform and any device. App Service is an integrated solution that streamlines development, enables easy integration with on-premises and SaaS systems and provides the ability to quickly automate business processes.

Azure App Service also introduces a new Premium Tier bringing increased scaling, deployment and service capabilities to app developers. In this post, I’d like to spend some time drilling into the benefits that come with the Premium Tier of App Service.

Premium Tier brings the power of BizTalk services to your apps, including 5,000 API calls per core per day for Premium Connectors, EAI Services, EDI Services and Rules. Standard connectors are included (unlimited).

The App Service Premium Tier also includes increased scalability and deployment headroom for your apps with all of the following:

• Increased file storage up to 250GB
• Up to 20 deployment slots affording developers more options for staging and managing deployments
• Developers can now backup apps as frequently as 50 times per day
• For your most intensive workloads you can now scale out your apps across 20 compute instances

Taking advantage of the Premium Tier is easy!

When you create a new App Service Plan, or configure an existing App Service Plan, you can select the new Premier tier from the pricing tier selector.  After selecting View All in the pricing selector, you will see the new Premium Tier options:

Choose the desired Premium option, and click the Select button to make your choice.  Once you save your changes for the App Service Plan, all of the apps running on the plan will be able to take advantage of the new capabilities.

Note that while the Premium Tier is in preview, the price is currently the same as the Standard Tier so this is a great opportunity to try out the Premium Tier capabilities!

Go here to learn more about App Service and watch the launch event. I hope you have fun woking trying out the new Azure App Service!