Question

There is an option for us to have 2 or more web roles in a single deployment. But each deployment can be either be staging or production i.e. by extension, we get only 1 URL to access that deployment.

Considering this case how to access the different webroles, what will be the URLs for those.Also what is the use for having multiple webroles in a single deployment.

Answer 1

Why multiple web roles in a single deployment? Consider an application with a public-facing (customer-oriented) website, as well as an administrative website (maybe on port 8000). There are two basic ways to handle this:

1. Place both sites in the same web role. This means they now share the VM instances, network cards, memory, etc. It also means that, should you need to scale to handle traffic, both sites are scaled together as a single unit.
2. Place each site in its own role. Now, they’re in their own VM instances and may be scaled separately.

Option #1 is more cost-effective because you can get by with only two role instances (minimum two needed for SLA). Option #2 is better for independent scaling. for instance: If you get a huge spike in customer traffic, this could cause trouble for you when trying to access the administrative website, whereas if your admin website is in its own role, it won’t be affected by customer traffic.

In both cases, you get one IP addres, one *.cloudapp.net name (and you can map a custom domain name to it with a CNAME).

Staging vs. Production: Your entire deployment may be published to either Staging or Production (or both, as two separate publishes). Staging is not meant for external users – it’s really meant for a pre-live area, where you can verify that a new deployment works as expected. You can then perform a virtual IP swap with your currently-running system in Production, which effectively swaps your staging and production deployments. This results in a near-instant upgrade of your software with no customer downtime.

Keep in mind: Every role in a deployment must stay together – you can’t deploy one role to one service and the other role to another service. If you want to do this: Separate your roles into separate deployments. Then you can publish them to different URLs.