Where Are Deployment Slots in Azure?

Azure App Service deployment slots are used to help roll out new versions of an app more efficiently and with less downtime. Deployment slots are live apps with their own hostnames.

They can be used to test new versions of an app before swapping them into production, or to canary releases where a new version is deployed to a small subset of users first.

There are several benefits to using deployment slots:

– Reduced downtime: When you deploy a new version of an app to a slot, the old version remains in production until the swap is completed. This means that your users experience little or no downtime.
– Easy rollbacks: If you deploy a new version of an app to a slot and it turns out to be buggy, you can simply swap it back to the previous version.

This is much easier than having to redeploy the old version from scratch.
– Scale independently: Deployment slots can be scaled independently from the production app, which can be useful for testing how a new version of the app will perform under load.

To create a deployment slot, navigate to the Azure portal and select your App Service. Then, under Settings, select Deployment Slots.

Click Add Slot, give the slot a name, and select whether you want to clone the settings from the production app or not. Once the slot has been created, you can deploy your new version of the app to it in the same way that you would deploy to the production app.

Once you’re happy with how the new version is performing in the staging slot, you can swap it into production. To do this, navigate back to Deployment Slots and click Swap. Select which slot you want to swap into production and click Swap again.

The old version of the app in production will be deployed to the staging slot, and the new version will be deployed to production. Once the swap is complete, all traffic will be routed to the new version of the app.

Deployment slots are a useful tool for reducing downtime and making rollbacks easy when deploying new versions of an app in Azure App Service.