Inspecting and managing Cloud Services

As we saw in the Deploying Cloud Services recipe, we can automate the deployment operations of Cloud Services to build rich automation solutions. When a Cloud Service has at least one deployment with any role, under the hood, there are virtual machines (also known as Instances) that hold the code of the web application or the worker process.

These VMs run a specific Windows Server OS, also called Azure Guest OS. Each Azure Guest OS is a modified version of Windows Server based on 2008 (now deprecated), 2008 R2, 2012, and so on.

We use the OperatingSystems property of the ComputeManagementClient object to obtain the currently available Azure operating system's versions. In this collection, OSes are grouped per family, which is a logical group based on the major version of Guest OS (that is, 2008, 2012, and so on).

In the Deploying Cloud Services recipe, we saw how to deploy and update a running role. In this recipe, we will see how to inspect it, walking...