Azure — Azure App Configuration Overview
Introduction to Azure App Configuration — What is Azure App Configuration?
TL;DR:
Azure App Configuration is managed service to centrally manage application settings and feature flags.
Centralized Configuration Management for Azure.
What is Azure App Configuration?
Modern applications, especially running in a cloud, generally have many components that are distributed in nature. There are multiple applications running in different geographical locations and a single solution may have different services running on different platforms like App Services, Virtual Machines, Azure Functions, etc. Managing application configuration settings across these components is difficult. And when issues come up, it’s even more difficult to troubleshoot issues. Having a centralized location to store your application configurations helps to solve these issues. One key recommendation from this guide is to separate configuration from code. In this case, an application’s configuration settings should be kept external to its executable and read in from its run-time environment or an external source. Use App Configuration to store all the settings for your application and secure their access in one place.
Read: Use Azure App Configuration with ASP.NET Core Application
App Configuration Benefits
- A fully managed service that can be set up in minutes. You don’t have to worry about the platform where the configurations are stored.
- Flexible key representations and mappings - flatly designed or hierarchically defined keys.
- Tagging with labels - having multiple values for a single key.
- Point in time snapshots that can be replayed in case you want to revert changes or compare configuration on two different points in time.
- Comparison of two sets of configurations on custom-defined dimensions - Ability to compare configurations on labels, date and time, etc.
- Enhanced security through Azure-managed identities - eliminate the use of connection strings to access Azure App Configuration.
- Complete data encryption, at rest or in transit.
- Dedicated UI for feature flag management.
- Native integration with popular frameworks.
How is App Configuration different from Azure Key Vault?
App Configuration complements Azure Key Vault, which is used to store application secrets. App Configuration is designed for a distinct set of use cases: it helps developers manage application settings and control feature availability. It aims to simplify many of the tasks of working with complex configuration data. App Configuration makes it easier to implement the following scenarios:
- Centralize management and distribution of hierarchical configuration data for different environments and geographies.
- Dynamically change application settings without the need to redeploy or restart an application.
- Control feature availability in real-time.
App Configuration supports:
- Hierarchical namespaces
- Labeling
- Extensive queries
- Batch retrieval
- Specialized management operations
- A feature-management user interface
Sample source code on GitHub
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Happy Clouding!
