What is an Azure Cloud Service?
Good question! An Azure Cloud Service is a highly available, scalable, and multi-layered web app hosted on a Windows VM with an installed IIS.
Hosted on a VM? Now you're probably thinking that an Azure Cloud Service is an Azure IaaS solution. Though the idea is obvious, there is a major difference. Cloud Services must be designed to work properly when any parts of the service fail. For this reason, the applications must not store their state in the filesystem of their own virtual machines. Unlike virtual machines created with Azure virtual machines, writes to virtual Cloud Services computers are not persistent because they do not have any virtual machines data disks. OK, enough of the remarks.