How to simulate a Windows Azure VM crash in my DevAppFabric

Question

We need to think big and our applications need to scale in order to work on the Windows Azure Platform. But how do I simulate a crash of one of the VMs running my application?
I want to see (debug) how my application behaves in such environment.

Answer 1

Simulating faults is simple (just call Thread.Abord()); but it won't tell you much about your design.

In particular, debugging is a bit irrelevant, because whenever VM stop working there is nothing more to observe (nothing more to debug too). You should just assume that your app is likely to be abruptly stopped at any point of its execution.

Since, you cannot realistically observe all the subtle data corruptions that could be caused by interrupted executions, you should think to your persistence design to be resilient to such problem from the start (idempotent processes help a lot when possible).