Assess ASP.NET web apps at scale to accelerate your app migration strategy on Azure

[Guest Mayunk Jain]

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is a flexible and cost-effective way for businesses to shift scarce resources from continuous infrastructure and application management to innovation at scale using the cloud. According to a recent study, Azure PaaS helps businesses achieve three-year returns of up to 228 percent, ramp up application development speed by 50 percent, and reduce app-dev related infrastructure costs by 40 percent. Azure customer success teams continue to streamline the migration of all workloads by incorporating best-in-class features, helping customers quickly unlock the power of Azure PaaS to gain a competitive advantage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Building an end-to-end flow for app modernization

 

 

Today, we are announcing a new set of PowerShell scripts to help you evaluate the readiness to migrate to Azure PaaS for a large number of ASP.NET web applications hosted on Azure Virtual Machines (VM). This expands upon existing Azure Migrate capabilities to enable migration of multiple ASP.NET web apps at-scale running on Windows OS in a VMware environment.

 

 

 

These tools simplify the web app discovery, assessment, and migration process for customers moving large numbers of servers and web apps to Azure PaaS in bulk.

 

 

 

In addition to large-scale migration tools, a variety of other migration tools exist to enable end-to-end workflows and address additional migration scenarios. For instance, the set of Azure Migrate and PowerShell scripts offer flexibility for developers running web apps in virtual machines or on-premises, while the Azure App Service migration assistant serves as a great starting point for developers interested in standalone migration testing.

 

 

 

Accelerate modernization with Azure VM assessment at scale

 

 

The PowerShell scripts announced today simplify the identification and evaluation of large numbers of ASP.NET applications on Azure Windows VMs, speeding up the assessment process. This simplifies the path for Azure IaaS customers who want to optimize hosting or modernize their applications with Azure PaaS solutions. With a quicker path to running apps in a cloud environment, developers can innovate faster by offloading infrastructure maintenance and other operational overhead tasks to the Azure fully managed services, such as Azure App Service.

 

 

 

Check out this quick demo to learn more:

 

 

 

 

Tool capabilities and wrapper script walkthrough

 

 

Let us look at a high-level overview of the tool. To use these tools, you would run these PowerShell scripts interactively from Azure Cloud Shell, PowerShell desktop, or any script host environment that has both Az.Accounts and Az.Compute modules pre-installed as well as PowerShell 7.0 or newer.

 

 

 

The scripts initiate parallel remote execution on targeted Azure Virtual Machines by first performing prerequisite checks, primarily to check that the VM is on a Windows Server 2008R2 running IIS. If all checks pass, the script runs the App Service Migration Assessment on each Virtual Machine and uploads the results to a blob storage container for review.

 

 

 

The assessment results in a JSON file for each Azure VM detailing the migration readiness of each Web App hosted on the IIS Server. The assessment highlights common issues such as:

 

• Apps that use session state
  
• Dependence on ISAPI filters or ISAPI extensions
  
• Bindings that are not HTTP or HTTPS
  
• Endpoints that are not 80 for HTTP, or 443 for HTTPS
  
• Authentication schemes other than anonymous
  
• Dependencies on applicationhost.config settings made with a location tag
  
• Applications that use more than one/custom application pool
  

 

You can find further information on issues identified and recommended remediations here.

 

 

 

Get started

 

 

The wrapper scripts are currently in preview and ready to use. Instructions and details on the prerequisites, including step-by-step guidance, can be found here: https://aka.ms/Azure-VMs/bulk-assess/ASP.NET.

 

 

 

Stay up to date on the latest in Azure app modernization

 

 

Bookmark the Apps on Azure blog to keep up with our expert coverage and product announcements and follow Microsoft Azure on Twitter for the latest news and updates.

 

 

 

(This post is co-authored with Kunal Babre, Principal Program Manager, and Gaurav Seth, Senior Program Manager)

 

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