Cloud Service deployment rolled back

Question

we had a strange issue a couple of times now with our Azure service. We have a cloud service installed that has a web application running on it.

The service was created sometime around beginning of december and he first deployment was done that time as well. After that we did multiple deployments to the cloud service, but (it happens a couple of times now) sometime the Azure decides to roll back the deployment to initial one - the one that was made 2 months ago. This happened this midnight once again and we see that the files creation date on the "restored" or "rolled back" instance is 12/5/2013, which seems to be the date when we did an initial deployment.

A question: 1) Why does that happen? 2) How can we determine what caused this rollback? 3) How can we prevent the rollback? or 4) How can we make a "snapshot" of the cloud service so when the Rollback happens, it actually rolls back to the latest stable image?

Thanks, Denis

Answer 1

How are you doing "After that we did multiple deployments to the cloud service"? Are you doing this via WebDeploy or via RDP to the Azure VM?

PaaS cloud service VMs are stateless. The code that is running your website will frequently be rebuilt from the original .cspkg that was uploaded. See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kwill/archive/2012/10/05/windows-azure-disk-partition-preservation.aspx for a bit more info.

If you want to make changes to your webrole then you need to upload a new cspkg. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh472157.aspx for more information.

If you are deploying via WebDeploy you should know that these changes are only intended for development/testing cycle and that the changes are only temporary. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff683672.aspx for more information, in particular the "For development and testing purposes only" section.