Introducing cloud services

Cloud services are PaaS Azure services that allow us to create highly available applications (99.95 percent monthly SLA) and deploy them to dedicated virtual machines of various image sizes, which can be scaled out to meet the demands of the system.

There are two types of cloud services, worker roles and web roles. Worker roles are similar to Windows Services; they are unattended applications with no user interface which that long-running tasks. Web roles are websites deployed in IIS and run on dedicated cloud service VMs; they are very similar to normal Azure websites, with the additional configuration and diagnostic capabilities of a cloud service.

Cloud services come with production and staging deployment slots that run on dedicated VM instances so that staged deployments don't impact the performance of the production deployment (unlike staging slots in websites). Cloud services can be debugged remotely (with IntelliTrace), run start-up tasks, and allow remote...