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We are planning to deploy one of our reporting application/product on Microsoft Azure platform for testing & research purpose.

Application is built on .NET framework 4.5 , and thankfully Azure does support 4.5 now.

Application is not Azure ready yet. I assume some config level changes are required to deploy it over Azure. Not much is required in Azure websites though.

Our Application has three major components , one is the MVC web layer built using n tier approach. Second component is an independent window service that pulls data periodically from an external system, and pushes that into the third component, a SQL Server database. MVC Web layer coupled with a business layer uses this SQL server to perform R/W operations.

Had it been a typical case of web application with a database, I'd have gone for Azure websites. Now that I have a window service/(Schedule based data puller) in picture as well, I am confused what accounts & services I should opt for , within the Azure platform ?.

Azure provides bouquet of services such as Websites, Service Bus, Cloud services, VM etc, but I am pretty confused what setup will fit in good for this application.

Some additional details about the application :

  • UserBase (for a single instance) : 10-30 users at a given time.
  • Data volume collected from external system/web service : approx 100 mb per day.

Do I need to setup multiple services like Azure websites at one end with a database, and for scheduler/window service something else ?

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Since you have a background windows service keep pulling data currently, I'd like recommend you using Windows Azure Cloud Service (WACS). You can migrate your MVC web portal as a web role and the background service logic into a worker role. Then your worker role can pull data from the external service and insert data into Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD). Then your web role can r/w data from WASD and display them in the portal.

The Windows Azure Web Site (WAWS) currently doesn't have the symmetrical feature as worker role. But since both WAWS and WACS can use WASD, you can move your web portal to WASD, and your background job into WACS worker role.

Hope this makes sense and helps

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I got a call from the Microsoft technical support, and he mentioned the same stuff. Additionally, he mentioned that Azure websites feature in still in preview mode, so the service is not part of the standard SLA. For now, I've to live with web role + worker role. In future, I'll rather prefer website feature for my MVC application, and then for the background service I'll use the worker role.

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