Upgrading the deployment

We have an option to upgrade our deployment on the fly in the portal. At our Hosted Service page, all we need to do is click the Upgrade... button. A quick note for us to remember: we can upgrade a deployment as long as service model is identical. In other words, we cannot upgrade if we added or deleted a role to our cloud project.

We will be asked a lot of the same information as the initial deployment (Application Package file, Configuration Settings file, Operating System Settings, and Deployment Name) but we do have two new options: Upgrade Mode and Service Upgrade.

For the Upgrade Mode, we can choose whether we want Windows Azure to upgrade our upgrade domains in sequence, or if we want to upgrade manually. Wait a second! We first need to understand what an upgrade domain. Upgrade domains are logical groupings of running instances. There are two upgrade domains by default. For example, imagine we had one role, with 10 different instances of it running. Now...