Question

Your team runs a production ASP.NET Core web app on Azure App Service (Standard tier). Business requires zero-downtime releases with the ability to instantly roll back if post-deployment smoke tests fail. You are designing the release stage in a multi-stage Azure Pipelines YAML file. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Deploy the new build to a 'staging' deployment slot, run smoke tests against the slot's URL, and if they pass perform a slot swap to production; if tests fail, do not swap.

Answer

Deploy directly to the production slot and configure a scheduled Azure Automation runbook to redeploy the previous artifact if Application Insights reports errors.

Answer

Use a canary strategy that routes 10% of traffic to the new version via Azure Front Door weighted routing, gradually increasing to 100% over several hours.

Answer

Stop the App Service, deploy the new build, restart it, and run smoke tests afterward against the production URL.