Question

I understand that one can host multiple websites on windows azure, I would like to know if I can add more websites to my cloud solution after I have already deployed it. If I am unable to would you have to add another site to the project then redeploy or it is not possible.

Answer 1

You define your sites in your service definition file. You can add sites to your service definition file and either redeploy your application tiers or do a VIP swap update. With the latter, you won’t miss a beat – you can deploy new roles in the staging slot (which will use the new config with the new sites) and then swap the staging and production slots. Requests will drain off the old and new requests redirected to the new. Voila, you’re new site is live.

That’s how we update our services (which we recently just added a new site as well).

Here’s more info on IIS service definition:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg433059.aspx

Here’s more info on VIP swap:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee517253.aspx