Deploy web application to Azure using Visual Studio

Traditionally web application are deployed to the server and published either publicly or internally. Prior to cloud, deploying web application was quite a long and tedious process and you need to have a proper infrastructure to deploy it. But with cloud service its very easy and even cheaper since now you don't have to worry about the infrastructure, everything will be taken care by the service provider. There are some pros and cons to it but this post is more related to deploying it to cloud, so will stick to the topic. So today I will show you how you can deploy the web application to azure using Visual Studio.

Dependencies
Visual Studio 2013 and up
Azure account

Creating a Azure Web App
Navigate to Azure Portal, and login to your account or sign-up for the trial.

Once you are logged-in, you'll will see plus sign as shown below and clicking on that will give various option as shown below. Select "Web App" and then click "Quick Create".

Enter the valid URL and should be unique and then you need to click on CREATE WEB APP. Verify that site is created and its running.

Now switch to Visual Studio and when you are ready to publish your website, follow the below steps to publish

Download Publishing File

1. Navigate to the portal and login to your account. 
   
2. After login select "Web Apps" and select the Web site you just created in the previous steps.
   
3. Select "Dashboard" and then select "Download the publish profile". Save the file to your local machine.

Publish Process in Visual Studio

1. Open your respective web application which needs to be published.
2. Right click on the web project and click publish and you will see the below screen.

• Now click on the Import button and browse to the profile which we downloaded and click OK.
• After this connection page will be displayed, in which most of the data will be auto populated through profile file. Verify the data and click on "Next"
  

The Settings page provides you an option to deploy as a Release or Debug as well as a place to define a database. Configure to suit your needs and select “Next >” 

Finally the Preview page provides a view of all the files to be uploaded to your Windows Azure Web Site. Click on "Publish".

Visual Studio will give you a log of information as it deploys to Windows Azure. Once the above process is completed, navigate to the url which we created and you will be able to see the website, if there are no build issue. 

Congrats, you have deployed your first web application to Azure.
I hope my post was helpful and please share if it was useful to you. Happy Coding.

Rishi