Testing and Deployment: Quality Is King - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 305

Creating and Deploying a Cloud Service
Using Windows Azure

In this section we will create and deploy a mock service using Windows Azure Management
Portal. We will use the Quick Create method to create a new service and then use the Upload
method to deploy the service to Windows Azure.
There are three components necessary to deploy an application or a service in Azure:
Cloud Service Definition File ( .csdef ) This defines the service model, including roles.
You can think of roles as attributes that define how an entity (individual) would behave.
Cloud Service Configuration File ( .cscfg ) This provides configuration settings for the
service and individual roles. It also includes the number of role instances.
Cloud Service Package ( .cspkg ) This contains the application itself, the source code, and
the service definition file.
The first step is to create the cloud service package from the application code and a service
configuration file. Each cloud service package contains application files and application con-
figuration files. The Windows Azure software development kit (SDK) provides tools for pre-
paring these files. The SDK can be downloaded from downloads page ( www.windowsazure
.com/en-us/develop/downloads/ ) in the preferred programming language.
The three cloud service features require special configuration files before you export a
service package:

To deploy a cloud service that uses secure connections (SSL), the application needs to
be configured for SSL.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff795779.aspx

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To enable remote connections to role instances, roles needs to be configured for remote
connections.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg433010.aspx

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To configure monitoring for the cloud service, the diagnostics feature needs to be enabled.
www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/diagnostics/

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The default setting is the minimal monitoring that presents performance counters from
the host OS for VMs. Detailed or verbose monitoring gathers additional metrics such as
issues or errors that occur during the application life cycle.
Before beginning, please make sure that you have a Windows Azure account set up. A trial
or basic account will be sufficient. Figure 10.7 shows a quick glance view of the Windows
Azure wizard for creating new cloud, data, app, and network services. In the URL field, enter
a subdomain name for accessing your cloud service in production deployments. In Region Or
Affinity Group, select a geographical region or affinity group where you wish to deploy the
cloud service. Typically, affinity groups help to deploy your cloud service to the same location
as other Windows Azure services within a region.