Local Debugging - Cloud Service and Service Fabric vs. App Service

Question

I looked into Azure cloud solutions and came up with below question regarding developing web app locally.

It seems like, if you develop Cloud Service, you can run locally with Azure emulator, if you develop Azure Fabric Cluster, you can run your cluster locally.

However, if you develop Wep app (part of App service) and you want to debug your app locally, you can either connect remotely your debugger to running web app or run the web app on your local iis.

Issue is, debug on azure emulator or running on local cluster seems to illustrate running the app on cloud better than develop on your local iis.

Am i missing something, or the development experience on App service lacks the option to run locally on "cloud like" environment(excluding the option of remote debug)?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

There is no emulator for App Service because at its core it is just an IIS farm (the Windows App Service at least).

We run apps locally on IIS Express + SQL Server 2016 Developer edition, and that corresponds quite well. Of course if we wanted we could set up an IIS farm locally and use that, but I think that's unnecessary.

You can get a bit closer to actual environment if you use the App Service Linux offering, as there you will run everything on Docker containers. So you debug on local Docker and then run it in prod on Docker.

I would also recommend you to check out deployment slots on App Service, as a staging deployment slot can help you find problems that occur in the cloud environment before you swap it into production.

In my personal experience developing apps for App Service, problems in the production environment were not caused because the environment was very different, but because we overlooked something with the database, made a mistake in a Web.config transform etc.