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Tutorial: Scale apps in Azure App Service using Ansible

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Important

Ansible 2.7 (or later) is required to run the sample playbooks in this article.

Azure App Service enables you to build and host code. This code can be in the form of web apps, mobile backends, and RESTful APIs. Using App Service, you can develop you code using the programming language of your choice without managing infrastructure. App Service supports both Windows and Linux. Automated deployments from any Git repo are supported, including GitHub and Azure DevOps.

In this article, you learn how to:

  • Get facts of an existing App Service plan
  • Scale up the App Service plan to S2 with three workers

Prerequisites

  • Azure subscription: If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a free account before you begin.

Scale up an app

There are two workflows for scaling: scale up and scale out.

Scale up: To scale up means to acquire more resources. These resources include CPU, memory, disk space, VMs, and more. You scale up an app by changing the pricing tier of the App Service plan to which the app belongs. Scale out: To scale out means to increase the number of VM instances that run your app. Depending on your App Service plan pricing tier, you can scale out to as many as 20 instances. Autoscaling allows you to scale instance count automatically based on predefined rules and schedules.

The playbook code in this section defines following operation:

  • Get facts of an existing App Service plan
  • Update the App service plan to S2 with three workers

Save the following playbook as webapp_scaleup.yml:

- hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  vars:
    resource_group: myResourceGroup
    plan_name: myAppServicePlan
    location: eastus

  tasks:
  - name: Get facts of existing App service plan
    azure_rm_appserviceplan_facts:
      resource_group: "{{ resource_group }}"
      name: "{{ plan_name }}"
    register: facts

  - debug: 
      var: facts.appserviceplans[0].sku

  - name: Scale up the App service plan
    azure_rm_appserviceplan:
      resource_group: "{{ resource_group }}"
      name: "{{ plan_name }}"
      is_linux: true
      sku: S2
      number_of_workers: 3
      
  - name: Get facts
    azure_rm_appserviceplan_facts:
      resource_group: "{{ resource_group }}"
      name: "{{ plan_name }}"
    register: facts

  - debug: 
      var: facts.appserviceplans[0].sku

Run the playbook using ansible-playbook

ansible-playbook webapp_scaleup.yml

After running the playbook, you see output similar to the following results:

PLAY [localhost] 

TASK [Gathering Facts] 
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Get facts of existing App service plan] 
 [WARNING]: Azure API profile latest does not define an entry for WebSiteManagementClient

ok: [localhost]

TASK [debug] 
ok: [localhost] => {
    "facts.appserviceplans[0].sku": {
        "capacity": 1,
        "family": "S",
        "name": "S1",
        "size": "S1",
        "tier": "Standard"
    }
}

TASK [Scale up the App service plan] 
changed: [localhost]

TASK [Get facts] 
ok: [localhost]

TASK [debug] 
ok: [localhost] => {
    "facts.appserviceplans[0].sku": {
        "capacity": 3,
        "family": "S",
        "name": "S2",
        "size": "S2",
        "tier": "Standard"
    }
}

PLAY RECAP 
localhost                  : ok=6    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0

Next steps

Ansible on Azure