Application Platforms Roadmap

The Development Tools and Services chapter discusses tools (in Azure and on-premises) that can assist IT development teams in the creation of applications for various environments.

The chapter includes the following products:

Core development tools

Power Platform

Other development tools

Management tools

The Web and Mobile chapter includes services for hosting serverless code routines, delivering events from multiple sources, storing and managing application metadata, searching content, working with media content, building geographic map-based applications, using prebuilt machine learning models to enhance application capabilities, publishing bots that automate user interactions, and incorporating communications such as voice and video into applications.

Products in this chapter includes the following:

Customers have several options for hosting Web sites on Azure. These options have trade-offs, for example:

Azure Web Apps (part of App Service) offer the fastest deployment and the least work managing the platform because of its PaaS design. Web Apps supports Windows Server and Linux.

Static Web Apps hosts Web applications that do not use server-side processing and instead rely on client-side processing to render Web pages from HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other asset files. This model could reduce hosting costs for solutions that are applicable to the design.

Azure VMs are best when complete control is required over the deployment and configuration of the Web server and supporting services, but they leave the most initial configuration and ongoing maintenance responsibility to the customer.

Cloud Services Web and worker roles could require more specialized coding than Web Apps. Cloud Services is the oldest Azure model for implementing Web sites, and in most cases it is no longer the best choice.

Application Integration chapter includes services that implement workflows that can connect to external applications and services that connect applications across the Internet and between on-premises deployments and the Internet, enabling, for example, business-to-business commerce transaction automation. This chapter also includes services for working with IoT solutions and hardware.