For basic public facing web applications, here is an outline of bare essentials for design and configuration. This gives you an idea of what the configuration looks like without clicking into all the blades in the Azure Portal.

Also, are a collection of embedded links to the detailed documentation.

App Service Plan
The computing infrastructure to run multiple web apps analogous to a server farm.

• Location: The physical location of hosting your apps for considering data latency and data residency.
• Scale Up:  Allocate CPU, memory, disk and other features.
  Some examples of pricing tier option
  
• Scale Out: The number of compute instances per the selected pricing tier.
  Or enabling autoscale by rules.

Web App
The Azure Web App is hosted within an Azure App Service Plan. Web App is also referred to as App Service.

• Application Settings: General settings at the hosting and application level. Some of these are similar to traditional some IIS settings.
  
• Custom Domains: The default hostname of the app is a subdomain of azurewebsites.net. Use custom hostnames purchased from a domain provider or through Azure App Service Domains.Also, there is an assigned public IP address.

  

• SSL certificates:

Apply cert to support encrypted traffic over https on your custom hostname.

Deployment

A fluid option to deploy to azure web app is important and saves a lot of time. With your source code in some repository the following are the options. This also sets the basis of a continuous integration pipeline.

• Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)

There are also other ways to deploy other than setting up via Azure Portal such as through VSTS into the Azure Web App.

Hope this blog post gives a good overview and a one-stop shop of online resources, screenshots and bare essentials to get started on a serious design.

Future follow up blog post will cover the next set of essentials.

• Authentication/authorization
• Managed service identity
• Networking options
• Batch jobs with Web Jobs
• Backups
• Application performance monitoring with App Insights