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I am looking at possibly running some of our business on Azure.

I am trying to pick the services that would work best for my company, but I am getting mixed signals.

Because I am starting a new system, I want to pick the offerings that are not "legacy" (aka "current"). But there seems to be no way straight forward way to know that.

For example, this page of the Microsoft Documentation says

Cloud Services is similar to Service Fabric in degree of control versus ease of use, but it’s now a legacy service and Service Fabric is recommended for new development.

This page clearly states that Cloud Services is "legacy". However, you would never know this by going to the Cloud Services overview page. It has great marketing material that sells Cloud Services as a great option. But if I picked it, then I would be starting out on a platform that is in a legacy status.

Now I know that about Cloud Services vs Service Fabric. But there are tons offerings on Azure. I am trying to research them one by one to find out which ones are the most recent incarnation, but I feel like I am wasting my time.

Another example is storage. Lucky for me an Azure MVP answered my question on this one. Apparently, there is "older storage account" based disks and "managed" disks. Turns out managed disks are the new, easy way to do things. The storage account is harder. Still available, but not really what a new user should be picking. But again, this is very hard to find out unless someone who has been working with this stuff for a long time tells you.

I was about to start in on App Services and Web Apps, but I thought I would ask first to see if I am doing research that is already done and posted out there.

Is there somewhere that shows the current list of Azure services that you should look at if you are starting a new project?

Vaccano
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  • Not sure where you read that Cloud Services are deprecated. You can still run them today, if you want to. They're just not part of the Azure Resource Manager API - it's managed via Classic API. And as far as Azure services go: there are *dozens* of services. There's no way to answer your question without knowing very specific details of your app. You're only going to get opinions. – David Makogon Apr 04 '17 at 22:07
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    @DavidMakogon - I may have not gotten the verbage quite right, but I went back and found where I saw that. This is the [link to a Microsoft Docs](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service-web/choose-web-site-cloud-service-vm) site that says "*Cloud Services is similar to Service Fabric in degree of control versus ease of use, but it’s now a legacy service and Service Fabric is recommended for new development.*" It is the very fact that I can easily run them, even though they are "legacy" and not "recommend for new development" that has me asking my question. – Vaccano Apr 04 '17 at 23:22
  • @DavidMakogon - I am not looking for opinions. I want to know which services are not the "currently recommended" path.... Much like Cloud Services. – Vaccano Apr 04 '17 at 23:24
  • Sorry but again, there's no right answer to that. If a service is available, it's current. And Service Fabric is *not* the same as Cloud Services (nor is it a drop-in replacement). Which services you decide to look at are going to be dependent on your app, and opinion. – David Makogon Apr 04 '17 at 23:28
  • @DavidMakogon - Again, I may have gotten the verbiage wrong when I said "current". I have updated my question to use the "legacy" wording found in the Microsoft Documentation. I also clarified another example of a storage account vs managed disks being another instance of older stuff still available, but not what a new user would likely want to select. – Vaccano Apr 05 '17 at 00:02

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I asked the similar question almost a year ago, and I even spoke with Azure Support Team after that. At that time, Microsoft did not officially state Cloud Service is legacy.

Does Azure App Service/Web App replace Azure Cloud Service?

We have been hosting our enterprise applications in Cloud Service since 2013, and a couple of them are in App Service. Here is my thought -

4 years ago we only have Cloud Service - Web Role and Worker Role,and App Service (formally named as Web App) is not fully ready for enterprise applications yet. Since App Service came up, Microsoft heavily promote App Service compare to Cloud Service. In addition, what I notice is Cloud Service did not get new features like App Service.

Service Fabric is quite new, and it doesn't have all the belts and whistles like App Service, so we might have to wait a bit for enterprise applications.

Only advantage of Cloud Service is you can remote desktop to a role instance, after the application is deployed.

If I host a new application in Azure today, I'll definitely use App Service.

Community
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Win
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Microsoft has published a list of Azure reference architectures. It was last updated in November 2016. You can browse it here, and there is some guidance given. But for example, you mentioned using Service Fabric (which is a great way to go for a robust app that really needs to scale), but Service Fabric isn't mentioned in the aforementioned resource.

I spend a lot of time running down Azure resources in relation to web applications (not to be confused with App Service Web Apps), and I have not found a definitive source of the type of info you're looking for personally.

Rob Reagan
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