In CICD, is there a functional difference between using Auto Swap and manually initiating the swap?

Question

Our CI/CD pipeline deploys our web app as follows:

az webapp deployment source config-zip --resource-group MyRG --name MyApp --slot deploy --src MyApp.zip
az webapp deployment slot swap --resource-group MyRG --name MyApp --slot deploy --target-slot production

I'm wondering if there's any reason for us to use the "auto swap" feature instead. Does it change anything about how the swap is performed or how failure is determined? Note: we use custom warmup by setting the WEBSITE_SWAP_WARMUP_PING_PATH and WEBSITE_SWAP_WARMUP_PING_STATUSES settings.

Answer 1

Hi @Noah S ,

From a pure swap activity, there is no fundamental difference between swapping manually and using auto. The difference is the trigger/initiator of the swap, as documented on https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/deploy-staging-slots#configure-auto-swap. If you always want to push your changes to the app service and want a failover, Auto Swap is the way to go. However, some may choose to use the swap to run various tests. In those cases, manually swap is the preferred method.