Cloud Services

by
Barry Briggs

by
Barry Briggs

Before joining Directions on Microsoft in 2020, Barry worked at Microsoft for 12 years in a variety of roles, including... more

Azure Cloud Services provides customers with Windows Server VM instances using a PaaS model. Customers do not have full administrator control over the instances, but this model reduces the burden of patching and maintaining the OS.

Service Overview

Cloud Services was one of the earliest Azure services to become available for production use. However, newer Azure offerings, such as Web Apps, Azure VMs, and Azure Functions, are often better choices than Cloud Services. Early Azure customers, including Microsoft, have deployed applications on Cloud Services, so it will be supported for the foreseeable future but is unlikely to receive major improvements.

Applications written for Cloud Services are divided into components known as Web roles and worker roles. Web roles primarily contain code that provides UIs or Web service interfaces through HTTP and HTTPS connections outside the data center. Worker roles are intended to perform tasks, such as calculations or data manipulation, after all required