AZURE CLOUD SERVICE (classic)

Cloud Service (classic) :

 Azure Cloud Services is an example of a platform as a service (PaaS). Like Azure App Service, this technology is designed to support applications that are scalable, reliable, and inexpensive to operate. In the same way that App Service is hosted on virtual machines (VMs), so too is Azure Cloud Services. However, you have more control over the VMs. You can install your own software on VMs that use Azure Cloud Services, and you can access them remotely.

More control also means less ease of use. Unless you need the additional control options, it's typically quicker and easier to get a web application up and running in the Web Apps feature of App Service compared to Azure Cloud Services.

There are two types of Azure Cloud Services roles. The only difference between the two is how your role is hosted on the VMs:

• Web role: Automatically deploys and hosts your app through IIS.

• Worker role: Does not use IIS, and runs your app standalone.

For example, a simple application might use just a single web role, serving a website. A more complex application might use a web role to handle incoming requests from users, and then pass those requests on to a worker role for processing. (This communication might use Azure Service Bus or Azure Queue storage.)

As the preceding figure suggests, all the VMs in a single application run in the same cloud service. Users access the application through a single public IP address, with requests automatically load balanced across the application's VMs. The platform scales and deploys the VMs in an Azure Cloud Services application in a way that avoids a single point of hardware failure.

Even though applications run in VMs, it's important to understand that Azure Cloud Services provides PaaS, not infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Here's one way to think about it. With IaaS, such as Azure Virtual Machines, you first create and configure the environment your application runs in. Then you deploy your application into this environment. You're responsible for managing much of this world, by doing things such as deploying new patched versions of the operating system in each VM. In PaaS, by contrast, it's as if the environment already exists. All you have to do is deploy your application. Management of the platform it runs on, including deploying new versions of the operating system, is handled for you.