Announcing general availability of App Service Mobile Apps

We recently rolled out a number of updates to App Service Mobile Apps making it a better platform for building and running mobile backends. Today, I am excited to announce general availability of App Service Mobile Apps, as well as one-click zero downtime migration capability for your existing Mobile Services to App Service.

Many customers already use Mobile Apps (check out Transport For London, Alaska Air, and other neat examples here). With this announcement, we encourage all of you to use the App Service Mobile Apps feature set for your production mobile apps and benefit from up to 99.95% SLA. Mobile Apps include the following capabilities:

• Easily connect your app to data in the cloud or on-premises, including SQL Azure, SQL on-premises, Mongo, Azure Table Storage, SaaS APIs like Dynamics and Salesforce.
• Enable your app to work with data offline and sync with above mentioned data sources
• Build mobile backend APIs in seconds without writing any code
• Intuitive SDKs for iOS, Android, Windows, as well as cross-platform frameworks like Xamarin, and Cordova
• Extend your mobile backend with custom code by leveraging App Service Mobile .NET or Node.js server side SDK, or directly via REST frameworks for other languages supported on App Service including PHP, Java, or Python
• Cross-platform push notifications to iOS, Android, Windows, Kindle and other devices (this capability is also available as a separate service: Notification Hubs)
• Authenticate and Authorize your users without adding any backend code using App Service Authentication/Authorization features

All of these capabilities are available and ready to be used in production with up to 99.95% SLA today, with the exception of server-side Node.js SDK which is still in preview. You can add these capabilities to any app running on App Service, whether it is a Web app, API app, or Logic app.

In addition to these capabilities specific for mobile backend development, you can take advantage of the broad set of App Service capabilities including:

• True hosting platform as a service with extensive auto scale, traffic management
• Enterprise features such as VNET and VPN support, high availability, backups, and role based access.
• Rich DevOps functionality including staging slots, testing in production, and integration with variety of Continuous Integration systems

For existing Azure Mobile Services customers, App Service Mobile Apps provide a superset of Mobile Services capabilities. To immediately take advantage of the above mentioned App Service functionality, we encourage you to migrate your existing mobile services to App Service with a single click and no downtime. This requires no changes to your client app.  Both .NET and Node.js migrated mobile services will enjoy the same up to 99.95% SLA. While the new Mobile Apps Node.js SDK is still in preview, your migrated Node.js mobile services are fully supported with 99.95% SLA. Once migrated, you can optionally follow this guide to upgrade your migrated mobile service to use the new Mobile App server-side SDK.

Watch this short video for a live demonstration of the Mobile Apps features.

We encourage you to start migrating your Node.js and .NET mobile services to App Service today! If you haven’t already, use App Service Mobile Apps for your next mobile app project. You can start by trying App Service, no credit card or sign-up required.

Connect with us on Twitter @AzureMobile, our MSDN forums, or the Azure feedback site.