VSTS Deployment with Azure App Service Deployment Slots

Utilizing Azure Application Deployment Slots with the Visual Studio Team Services build and deployment system is quite simple. Set Up Deployment Slots The first step is to create your deployment slots for your application. You do this in your Azure Portal. Open the dashboard to your App Service application’s options. About halfway down the menu options that appear for your app you will see “Deployment slots”. Select this option. Click “Add Slot” and give your deployment slot a name. It also asks you to select whether or not to copy the existing configuration options from an existing slot. This will depend on your preferred deployment process. Some people let their deployment instance use all the same configuration options. I usually use the existing database connections, if any, but will alter any message queues, blob storage, table storage, and anything else that can trigger functionality on the back end, I point these to their respective testing versions so I don’t mess with production data unexpectedly. This is especially true for message queues, I feel. I want to be able to control the testing of the staging slot and not have it kick off unexpectedly if some production message gets through.