Microsoft s Azure App Service Reduces Time and Cost for Web Application Development and Management

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1 Microsoft s Azure App Service Reduces Time and Cost for Web Application Development and Management Published by: Value Prism Consulting Sponsored by: Microsoft Corporation Publish date: February 2016 Abstract: Developing apps one by one for multiple platforms and use cases is not scalable. Employees expect business apps to be well designed and capable, to function as seamlessly as their favorite consumer apps, and to work on any device wherever they are. Azure App Service is an enterprise-ready solution that makes it easy to build deeply integrated web and mobile apps that work across any platform on any device. Value Prism Consulting, a management consulting firm, was engaged by Microsoft Corporation to compare customer experience using Azure App Service versus traditional web application development. Based on collected data, average web app development time was reduced by 26% and an average on-going management effort declined by 60%.

2 Disclaimer Every organization has unique considerations for economic analysis, and significant business investments should undergo a rigorous economic justification to comprehensively identify the full business impact of those investments. This analysis report is for informational purposes only. VALUE PRISM CONSULTING MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT Value Prism Consulting, LLC. All rights reserved. Product names, logos, brands, and other trademarks featured or referred to within this report are the property of their respective trademark holders in the United States and/or other countries. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this report may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this analysis. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this analysis does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property of Microsoft. ii

3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Creating ground breaking business apps is complex and time-consuming. It involves working across multiple operating systems and devices, scaling infrastructure, securely integrating data and access to multiple line of business systems, as well as automating business processes. Azure App Service is a one-of-a-kind cloud service that enables organizations to seamlessly integrate everything from mobile and web development with back-end systems in a radically simpler way. This allows organizations to deliver amazing apps significantly faster than using traditional development process. Organizations can stop worrying about the infrastructure and dealing with fragmented tools and instead focus on building great apps. This whitepaper is aimed at organizations IT decision makers looking to better understand benefits of using Azure App Service. Organization participating in this study, on average, experienced 26% reduction in development time which amounted to $15,000 savings per developed application. Traditional Total Web App Development Our company culture is to move fast, Yet, our web app development used to take 6 to 8 months. With Azure App Service we have improved it to 3 months 26% Azure App Service Hours per App ,000 1,200 App Requirements and Design Development Deployment and Maintenance For all managed web and mobile applications, average reduction in IT Admin effort was 60% which resulted in annual average savings of approximately $1,500 per application. Shorter development process means faster time to market and increased capacity to develop more apps, which drives IT and business partnership. 1

4 INTRODUCTION Developing apps one by one for multiple platforms is not scalable and not the best use of developers skills or time. To drive workforce productivity in a mobile-first world, employee and customer apps need to work on any device, no matter the platform, seamlessly integrate information from backend systems and work around business processes. Azure App Service is a solution that brings together the tools needed for building enterprise-ready apps around a common development, management and billing model. One can choose from a rich ecosystem of pre-built apps and API services and a unified set of enterprise capabilities including mobile backend services, turnkey connectivity to SaaS and enterprise systems, and workflow-based creation of business processes. Azure App Service frees developers to focus on delivering great business value instead of needing to worry about repetitive tasks such as stitching disparate data sources together and dealing with operational and compliance overhead. This unified approach lets organizations take full advantage of the service while meeting organization s goals for security, reliability, and scalability. In this study commissioned by Microsoft, several customers shared their data and experiences using Azure App Service for their web app development and management. The data was gathered, analyzed and the results were organized using common web app development process, as follows: Planning Requirements gathering Design and architecture Prototype or POC Development Code development Website/App integration Source code management Testing Deployment and Management Deploy to production Change management System administration 2

5 APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS GATHERING, DESIGN AND PROTOTYPING Developing a new website or web / mobile business application can be a lengthy process. Business requirements and/or customer needs can change often between starting and actually deploying the website / application. Azure App Service offers standardization and simplification through out-of-the box tools. Stages Traditional App Development Azure App Service Requirement Document and capture customer gathering requirements. Same as before. Length and time consuming process involving planning / Simplified and consistent planning / design - no Designs (architecture and technical) design for server/infra capacity; integration with existing apps and management tools; user right provisioning rules; business rules, disaster recovery, etc. purchase of hardware; prebuilt infrastructure; autoscale infrastructure; pre-built integrations with APIs, apps, back-end systems; etc. Prototype / POC Prototype building is detailed, time consuming and costly; often requiring building and provisioning of large test / POC environments. Pre-built staging, testing environments that can emulate actual production environments. Ready for POC. With Azure App Service we were able to put mobile app demo in front of the customer within a month! Current customers who participated in this study experienced significant effort reductions in designing and prototyping phases of web app development. On average, customers are seeing 43% time reduction which translates to $9,300 savings per newly developed web application. App Requirements Gathering, Designing and Prototyping Traditional Azure App Service % Hours per App Requirements Gathering Designing Prototyping APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT Organizations typically spend a considerable amount of time and resources in developing the application. Documentation, source code management, and testing ads to additional dev time needed apart from just writing the code. The following table 3

6 captures key differences between traditional web app development process and the one using Azure App Service. 4 Stages Traditional App Development Azure App Service Need to find and employ special technical resources. Familiar development platform Hard to ensure continuity in Resource with.net based SDK and Visual these resources; leading to Allocation and Studio Online. Developers can constant need to re-hire, Training use.net, NodeJS, PHP, retrain skills and pay for Python, Java. learning curve with each person. Website / App Coding or Code Development Website / App Integration with Existing Systems Source Code Management or Versioning Testing Multiple dev tools to build websites/apps across devices and platforms. Even basic capabilities can take many man hours, with most applications built inconsistently, full of spaghetti code, different designs, etc. Integration is difficult since both software and hardware infrastructure of the organization need to be adapted to the app. Creating custom extensions require great deal of time and effort. None or external tools/environments for checking in code, dealing with versions, etc. Lot of time invested in governance and source code control. Integration testing in putting together all the code from different developers. Testing to make sure that feature functionality works. Performance and stress testing requires significant Monolithic app development across OS and devices. Integration with CMS (separation of text and code) minimizes recoding. Workflow based business process creation. Avoid repetitive tasks and manual coding. Wealth of pre-built apps in the Azure marketplace. Heterogeneous integration of Technologies (frontend, backend, CMS, weblogic...). Prebuilt APIs and app services providing integration with Azure AD, Azure SQL DB, Azure Storage, HDInsight, Power BI, O365, Dynamics CRM, and other Azure services and LOB apps. Visual workflows for business processes. Built-in DevOps. Visual Studio online for source control and bug tracking. Continuous integration and live-site debugging with VS Online or Git. Built-in DevOps. Visual Studio online for source control and bug tracking. Pre-built apps and APIs mean less custom code to test. With seamless integration with VSO deployment and build process are a breeze. In Azure, creating a staging environment is not only effortless, but also reliable in terms of service similarities. There virtually no need to repeat the testing for staging and production environment.

7 provisioning of infra and/or time. Customers are seeing significant benefits in source code management and testing areas of the development phase. On average, customers experienced 13% time reduction in the entire development phase which translates to $4,500 savings per newly developed web application. App Development Traditional Azure App Service % Hours per App Code Development Website App Integration Source Code Management Testing APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT AND MAINTENANCE Once the application is developed, it needs to be moved to a production environment, which often requires rebuild of the application. Once deployed, the application and the supporting infrastructure may undergo changes and needs constant maintenance. Stages Deploy to Production Traditional App Development Mostly manual task of moving the code from one environment to the other (dev to test to production). Azure App Service Built-in staging, roll-back, testing environments. Move to production in a few clicks. 5

8 Process can take many days and risk of human errors. Change Management System Administration Simple changes may require new release, extensive coding. Typically only 5% of custom apps can be changed / adjusted without a release. Time invested in managing infrastructure, security policies / user administration, patch management, back-up and restore tasks, etc. Separation of code and content management. Continuous integration and live-site debugging (VS Online, GitHub). No physical hardware to maintain. Easy cloud based management with Intune. Pre-built integration with AD ensures easy provisioning of role-based security. Automatic backup and restore capabilities. Auto scale capabilities. Deployment using Azure App Service is a breeze. It is on average 81% less time consuming than traditional web app development, based on experience of customer who participated in our study. This equates to savings of $1,100 per newly developed application. Deployment Traditional 34 Azure App Service 7 81% Hours per App Deploy to Production Change management and system administration for all web apps are also more efficient and free up IT resources. Average savings experienced by our study group were $700 per managed application per year. BUSINESS BENEFITS Creating web and mobile apps for any platform or device faster than ever before delivers cost savings but, more importantly, significant business benefits. 6

9 Participants of the study consistently brought up examples from the two key areas: shorter development time and SLA. Shorter development time means faster time to market and freed up capacity to build more apps. In fact, on average, study participants expected to undertake 10 more project year after switching to Azure App Service. More nimble IT allows for more business experimentation and speedier product development. All customers mentioned they had lofty SLA for uptime, and none of them could deliver it in the previous hosted environment. Azure uptime SLA of 99.95% fulfills the IT promise to the business. It also means less business loss due to downtime. CONCLUSION Microsoft Azure App Service provides large time and cost reduction in web and mobile app development and on-going app management. Development time savings could easily be translated in cost reductions or additional free development capacity. Azure App Service also empowers IT to deliver on expected SLA and build stronger partnerships with business in product development area. 7

10 APPENDIX A: Methodology In a study commissioned by Microsoft, several customers who have been using Azure App Service filled out detail questionnaire estimating time spent in each activity of the web app development and management processes. Value Prism Consulting also interviewed several customers who provided data. The data was then aggregated. Average organization participating in the study had: Full Time Employees 28,500 IT Staff 170 Developers 32 System Administrators 25 Number of Managed Web Applications 111 Each customer situation will be different. Individual results may thus be lower or higher than the ones listed here. Customer should carefully evaluate deployment, migration, and on-going management costs specific to their solution requirements before making a decision. B: About Value Prism Consulting Value Prism Consulting is a valuation and management consulting firm that provides services to a broad range of clients worldwide. Our Management Consulting Practice assists clients with business case development and decision support analysis. Our solutions measure the results of various options related to business process improvement, capital and major budget-spending decisions, including infrastructure upgrades, and the value of new product introductions. Visit for more information. 8