How to create or see existing App Service Plans in Azure portal and modify them?

Question

I am trying to determine Azure portal provides any option to create an App Service Plan in a separate step (not while creating the website) and to modify them. Currently I am creating App Service Plans in the WebSite creation step and modify them in WebSite's Scale option.

1. Is there any way to create them separately and see a list of available App Service Plans?
2. Do websites created within an App Service Plan share the resources in it (CPU, Memory etc)?

3. What exactly happens when there is an auto scale up?

   a.) Will it create a new instance of the App Service Plan and replicate all the websites within it?

   b.) or will it create a new instance of the website and share the resources of same App Service Plan?

I am confused because, the App Service Settings (pricing tiers, scale-up option etc) are seen in websites scale option.

Please clarify my doubts.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

See page 8 of Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions Exam Reference for 70-532.

"Web hosting plans are created as part of website creation and are not created directly"

Even though this book was published in Feb 2015 some of the terminology is already out of date. It's an "application service plan", not "web hosting plan". And they call what is now known as a "web app" a "website".

Here is an awesome blog post about setting up azure web apps and deployment slots and hosting plans. It goes over what's shared and how to migrate between application service plans about halfway through.