Windows Azure role is state full or not

Question

According to MSDN, an azure service can conatins any number of worker roles. According to my knowledge a worker role can be recycled at any time by Windows Azure Fabric. If it is the true, then:

1. Worker role should be state less OR
2. Worker role should persist its state to Windows Azure storage services.

But i want to make a service which conatains client data and do not want to use Azure storage service. How I can accomplish this?

Answer 1

You can write to local storage on the worker role by using the standard file IO APIs - but this can get erased at any time, so this isn't a good idea.

You could also use SQL Azure, or post your data off to another storage service by HTTP (e.g. Amazon S3, or your own server).

However, this is likely to have performance implications. Depending on how much data you'll be storing, how frequently, and how big it is, you might be better off with Azure Storage!

Why don't you want to use Azure Storage?

Answer 2

The velocity (whatever it is called) component of AppFabric is a distributed cache and can be used in these situations.

Answer 3

Azure's web and compute roles are stateless means all its local data is volatile and if you want to maintain the state you need to use some external resource to maintain that state and logic in your app to handle that. For simplicity you can use Azure drive but again internally its a blob storage.