Deploying Cloud Services

Azure services have similar self-provisioning models. The user reserves a name/namespace for the deployment unit, and then, they deploy its service using the specific technology of the actual service. For storage, the deployment unit is the storage account itself. For compute, it is represented by the concept of Cloud Services, a robust and fully featured container of web applications (web roles) and generic processes (worker roles).

The ComputeManagementClient object is the specific client to work with Cloud Services and VMs. In this book, however, VMs are not covered. A Cloud Service-hosting web or worker role is represented by a service name with two (staging and production) deployment slots. A user can deploy the same solution to both the slots that have two independent environments, which are swappable at runtime in a few seconds, thanks to the VIP swap functionality.

VIP swap is a user-initiated process that swaps the load-balancer pointer to the deployment...