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I've written a Node app that essentially serves as a Task Scheduler (or cron) to run batch processes on set time intervals using node-schedule. When I run this program locally or on a VM, the process will run continuously and execute my jobs until the process is forcibly killed. When I deploy this app to Azure as an Azure App Service, the process is treated more as a "Web App", and after a period of inactivity on the site (ie no web traffic), Azure kills the process. If I access the "site" via a browser, it kicks it back up again.

It seems as though Azure is tied to the Node app being an express-based "web app" and as far as I can tell, there's not a way to deploy my command line app in a reliable manner. Am I missing something or is there a better way to deploy this application in Azure either via Web App, or another offering? Would really like to avoid having to maintain a VM just for this purpose.

Zahid Faroq
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Josh Morton
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1 Answers1

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For your immediate problem of idle timeout there is a simple configuration available called Always on. Take a look at the link here - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/web-sites-configure.

Always On. By default, web apps are unloaded if they are idle for some period of time. This lets the system conserve resources. In Basic or Standard mode, you can enable Always On to keep the app loaded all the time. If your app runs continuous WebJobs or runs WebJobs triggered using a CRON expression, you should enable Always On, or the web jobs may not run reliably.

Also look at cost implications discussion here - Does the Azure Websites "*Always On" option have any implication on price?

Now whether App Service is the best solution or not for your problem of Task scheduling, is a more subjective and longer discussion, where you need to evaluate multiple offerings that Azure has and your requirements/priorities etc.

Azure has it's own task scheduling service - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/scheduler/

Scheduler Jobs are very simple to configure from Azure Portal. You can:

  1. Make calls to http/https endpoints (which implicitly gives you multiple ways to solve your problems). Authentication can be done using basic, certificate or AzureAD OAuth Client credentials).
  2. Send messages to Storage queue or Service Bus queue/topic which can then be processed appropriately by other processes.

If those Azure Scheduler capabilities aren't enough and you need something more involved, here is some guidance on the best practices documentation on background jobs - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/best-practices/background-jobs#schedule-driven-triggers

Rohit Saigal
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