Question

I have created a hosted service with two roles – a web and a worker role. I want to use ZeroMQ to communicate between the roles internally (I plan to create a bunch of such hosted services, with slightly different data to process in each). I’m wondering how to find out the internal IP address of the worker role from the web role and vice versa so that I can use them in ZMQ’s connect(). Is this possible at all?

Answer 1

Yes this is possible. You can access your Roles through the RoleEnvironment, then you have access to your Instances, your Endpoints, …

foreach (var role in RoleEnvironment.Roles)
{
    // Access role.Key to identify the role.

    foreach (var instance in role.Value.Instances)
    {
        // Access instance.Id to identify the instance.

        foreach (var endpoint in instance.InstanceEndpoints)
        {
            // Access endpoint.Key to identify the endpoint.

            System.Net.IPAddress ip = endpoint.Value.IPEndpoint.Address;
            int port = endpoint.Value.IPEndpoint.Port;
        }
    }
}