If you’re a developer or IT professional who works with Microsoft Azure, you’ve probably heard the term “slots” thrown around. But what exactly are slots, and why are they important In this article, we’ll delve into the world of slots in Azure and explore their many benefits.
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First, let’s define what we mean by “slots.” In Azure, a slot is essentially a deployment environment.
When you create an Azure web app, you can create one or more slots within that web app. Each slot is a separate instance of your application that shares the same resources as the main app, but has its own configuration settings and content.
So why would you want to use slots There are several reasons.
First and foremost, slots allow you to deploy your application changes without downtime. When you deploy a new version of your app to a slot, it runs alongside the existing version until you’re ready to swap them. This means that your users never experience any downtime or interruptions during the deployment process.
Another benefit of slots is that they allow you to test your application changes in a staging environment before deploying them to production. You can create a separate slot for testing and use it to validate your changes and make sure everything works as expected before rolling out those changes to your production environment.
Slots also make it easy to roll back changes if something goes wrong. If you deploy a new version of your app and something breaks, you can simply swap back to the previous version in seconds without affecting your users.
So how do slots work in practice Let’s say you have an Azure web app with two slots: “production” and “staging.”
You’ve made some changes to your code and want to test them in the staging environment before rolling them out to production. Here’s what the process might look like:
1. Deploy your updated code to the staging slot. 2.
Test your changes and validate that everything works as expected. 3. Swap the staging slot with the production slot to make your changes live.
That’s it! And if something goes wrong during the deployment process, you can simply swap back to the previous version of your app in seconds.
So how do you create and manage slots in Azure It’s actually quite simple.
When you create a new web app, you can specify how many slots you want to create and what their names should be. You can then deploy code to each slot using the same deployment process you would use for the main app.
You can also manage your slots using Azure’s web app management portal or via PowerShell scripts. This allows you to easily view and manage each slot’s configuration settings, content, and deployment history.
In summary, slots are a powerful feature of Azure that allow you to deploy changes without downtime, test new features in a staging environment, and roll back changes if needed. If you’re not already using slots in your Azure web apps, now is the time to start exploring this powerful tool!