Nordlicht Reisen GmbH, a fictional travel agency, does not want to run its travel website on a virtual machine of its own, but on a managed service that takes care of the operating system, updates and the web server. That is Azure App Service. You are to create an App Service plan, configure its scaling and create an app, as the exam puts it. The lesson after this one (3.8) covers operations: TLS, DNS, backup, networking and slots.
Prior knowledge: What App Service is compared with virtual machines and containers is covered in "AZ-900 compact," lesson 2.3. Containers as an alternative are covered in lesson 3.6 of this course.
The App Service plan
An app always runs in an App Service plan. The plan is the compute power that your apps share. According to Microsoft, it defines:
- the operating system (Windows or Linux),
- the region,
- the number of VM instances,
- the size of the instances (small, medium, large),
- the pricing tier.
Several apps in the same plan share the same instances. That also applies to deployment slots, diagnostic logs, backups and WebJobs: they need compute time and storage on the same instances. All apps of a plan scale together. If you want to isolate an app from the others, create a plan of its own.
The pricing tiers
| Category | Tiers | Feature |
|---|---|---|
| Shared compute | Free, Shared | runs on the same VM as other customers' apps, with a CPU quota per app; no scaling out |
| Dedicated compute | Basic, Standard, Premium, PremiumV2, PremiumV3, PremiumV4 | own VMs; only apps of the same plan share them |
| Isolated | IsolatedV2 | own VMs in their own virtual networks (App Service Environment) |
Which features apply from which tier on, you remember for the exam like this (sources: the pages on scaling, backup, slots and certificates, as of November 11, 2026):
| Feature | from tier |
|---|---|
| Custom domain | Shared |
| Certificate and TLS binding for the custom domain, backup | Basic (with Basic, backup only for the production slot) |
| Deployment slots, autoscale, IP-based SSL | Standard |
| Automatic scaling | Premium v2 to v4 |
According to Microsoft, Free and Shared have no financially backed service level agreement (SLA). For production, Microsoft recommends at least Standard.
What a plan costs
Except in the Free tier, a plan costs money for the compute power it occupies. In the dedicated tiers, every VM instance is billed. With Shared, each app gets a CPU quota and is billed for it. Features such as domains, certificates (except purchased ones), slots and backups cost nothing extra. A plan without apps keeps costing, because it holds the configured instances ready. If you delete the last app of a plan, App Service deletes the plan too by default; if you keep it, set it to Free so that nothing is billed. This course does not state amounts; estimate them in the Azure pricing calculator and on the App Service pricing page (lesson 0.1 and K3, lesson 3.1.2 show the method).
For the test account, this applies: Microsoft names as a prerequisite that you remove the subscription's spending limit before leaving the Free tier. Read in lesson 0.1 what the limit does on your account.
Creating a plan
az appservice plan create --name plan-nordlicht --resource-group rg-az104-webapp --sku B1 --is-linux
With --is-linux, a Linux plan is created; without the switch, a Windows plan. --sku selects the tier and size (for example B1, S1, P1V3). Always name --sku explicitly: Microsoft has changed the default in the CLI (according to the May 2026 release notes, P0V3 is the default for Linux web apps; older guides speak of B1). Azure PowerShell creates the plan with New-AzAppServicePlan. In the portal, you find it under App Service plans (the portal's labels differ depending on the language setting).