Some basic Azure Questions.

Question

I'm currently in the process of building our ASP.NET C# 3.5 Web site and I have been looking at Azure as our possible hosting environment and I had a couple of questions that I couldn't really find answers for on their website. I would appreciate if someone could help me get these figured out.

1) If I setup a single cloud server with my ASP.NET application & SQL server database, and the server went down, Would my application automatically get brought over to a new cloud server and continue to run? Or, am I required to manually move the data over to a new cloud server?

2) In the future, when I need to maintain more instances to handle the load, How hard is it to configure the database and sessions to work across all of the instances?

3) Do I still get remote desktop access on the cloud servers?

4) Are there any other cloud hosting provider that you would recommend over Azure for Windows hosting?

Answer 1

1. Yes, there is automatic failover and backup
2. You change a number in a config file, and click save
3. Not currently
4. I haven't done a ton of research, but Azure is pretty impressive. It all depends on what your needs are.

Answer 2

If you're a powershell guy, you can write a powershell to swap out the config files for you, there's a pretty good walk through to do that here: http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Azure/Deployment/DeployingApplicationsinWindowsAzure/Exercise-2-Using-PowerShell-to-Manage-Windows-Azure-Applications/

If you're a cmd file guy, you can use the csmanage.exe to swap config files, downloadable here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples.