Moving a Service to Microsoft Azure

Having written about lifting and shifting a Console Application, I decided to mirror the scenario and describe how a similar method can be used to lift and shift a Windows Service to Microsoft Azure.

Every time I dig a little deeper into Azure, I’m amazed at how much there is to know. Having done a few projects with Cloud Services in the past, I thought it would be interesting to see if it was possible to lift and shift a Windows Service into an Azure Worker Role.

Lift and Shift: The action of moving a workload to a new environment, without altering the application’s code.

Moving to Microsoft Azure

Every time I dig a little deeper into Azure, I’m amazed at how much there is to know. Having done a few projects with Cloud Services in the past, I thought it would be interesting to see if it was possible to lift and shift a Console Application into an Azure Worker Role.

Lift and Shift: The action of moving a workload to a new environment, without altering the application’s code.

#WindowsAzure Lessons Learned – Continuous Services Require Continuous Attention

In the recent months Microsoft has accelerated the cadence on the release of Windows Azure Guest OS updates. Cloud Services greatly benefit from these frequent updates. But it also means that your services will reboot more often. In order for Microsoft to provide an interesting SLA for your Windows Azure Cloud Services, it’s recommended that we run a minimum of 2 instances of each Role. On the other hand, if your Cloud Service is built to deal with sporadic interruptions, you shouldn’t have to worry about over provisioning Roles because they probably don’t require the extra uptime guarantees provided by the elevated SLA.

Windows Azure Guest OS updates may affect some Cloud Services that require specific configurations to work properly. On Feb 6, 2014 the Windows Azure team released a survey to find out how they could serve us better. They intend on using this data to make decisions on future Guest OS policies including retirement, disablement and expiration periods. Go to the Windows Azure Guest OS Survey to take the survey. It will be available until Feb 21st 2014.

More information about the Windows Azure Guest OS can be found on the Windows Azure Guest OS Releases and SDK Compatibility Matrix.

The Continuous Service that I use to collect community interest through Twitter is hosted on a single Worker Role who is responsible for absorbing a tremendous amount of Tweets about Windows Azure. It then indexes them and tried to regroup them in order to identify what we’re really interested in.