Windows Azure project development lifecycle

When you develop projects on Windows Azure, in typical cases you want to begin with a small size of the project, which uses the least resources possible. Then, as your project grows, you configure your project to utilize more resources to accommodate the performance and size requirements of the project. This topic presents main levels of development on Windows Azure and provides links to related configuration tasks, which you need to perform when ascending to a higher level.

Level 0 - Local development

You can choose to begin developing your Azure project locally in an emulator before deploying it to the cloud environment. In this case, set up a database and Azure Storage service and configure the web role's settings. See Developing Azure projects locally.

Level 1 - Development

For the duration of project development, one instance of CMSApp web role is usually enough. To configure a project to use one web role instance, perform the basic configuration tasks.

Level 2 - Production with SLA

When you deploy your project and switch to the production environment, you may want to qualify for Microsoft SLA⁠ (opens in a new tab). In such case, your project must use at least two instances of the CMSApp web role. When you increase the number of used web role instances, you need to adjust your project to synchronize the data between the instances and to store session state information.

For data synchronization, you can use the default web farm synchronization tasks, in which case you do not need to configure anything.

For storing session state information, you can use Windows Azure SQL Database – see Storing session state information in SQL Database.

Level 3 - Performance