Windows Services in the The Cloud

Question

Im looking at writing a application for a web 2.0 start up site which will essential monitor specific RSS feeds.

Due to the expected up take of such a service I am expecting that taking advantage of cloud computing would be the way to do it, however with my lack of experience I do not know if it is possible to run a Windows service in the cloud.

There will be a web front end to this but it isn't imagined that that will have a heavy load as it will be just for sign up, then users will recevie notifications by SMS/Email

Answer 1

Managed to find this link to publishing WCF services in the cloud. Im new to WCF so not sure if it will offer the solution I require, it probably will but I need to do some more research

http://geekswithblogs.net/bloesgen/archive/2008/12/21/128098.aspx

Answer 2

You can run a "service" in the cloud, when using Azure. It's called a "Worker Role" see the Architecture here.

Answer 3

If you're looking at running Windows Azure (which splits into a web role and worker role). You'll have to sign up for an Azure key (The Bizspark pack includes one I believe) to get started, download the SDK and Azure tools.

It looks like you would only really need the web role for this, in which case it's just a normal ASP.NET / MVC site that you'd write as normal.

Essentially the benefit you'd get here would be being able to ramp up the number of server instances running your application by tweaking the config file.

Answer 4

The other option is the Amazon EC2 Cloud which allows you to instantiate as many instances of Windows2k3 Data Centre edition as you need. I run Windows Services, IIS, Postgresql etc. on such an instance with no issues.