Replacement for Azure SDK Powershell commandlets for deployments

Question

Hi,

We've run into an issue with the New-Deployment Azure Powershell commandlet timing out; we've put in a bug report with MS. While they gave us an explanation for it (the path and timeout threshold used to upload through commandlets is different then what's used by the web portal); they don't have a fix for us.

We need to get this running so we can automate our build deployments, so we're looking into developing a custom commandlet to replace New-Deployment using the Azure SDK; hoping this path will not have the timeout issues the commandlet did. But before we go down that route; are there any other scriptable tools I can use to replace the New-Deployment functionality? I looked at Cloudberry for Windows Azure; but that doesn't have a scriptable interface yet.

Any constructive input is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If you are developing worker roles, then you can reuse the dynamic assembly loading system that comes with the execution framework of Lokad.Cloud.

Basically, you just have to upload a ZIP archive containing all your DLLs toward the Blob Storage and the framework takes care of the rest. Extra Bonus: worker restart takes about 10s (vs +10min for a classical deployment)

A similar behavior could be obtained with web roles too, but this part hasn't been implemented in Lokad.Cloud yet.

Answer 2

FYI, we solved this issue by writing a custom tool to upload the package with a higher timeout tolerance; as well as using CSManage (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=windowsazuresamples&ReleaseId=3233) to create the deployment after uploading.