How website will differ from webrole application in new Azure portal

Question

I have gone trough new portal of Window Azure and in that new feature called website which is for small scale web application on shared VM of Azure data center.

I would like to know that how it exactly differ with webrole application except deployment?(in website we don't need to add cloud project. i have tried it with Git.)

In Webrole application i was doing some configuration of startup task and some custom app settings in .csdef & .cscfg file.

Is it possible to add startup task and other custom config setting in Azure website? if yes then how?

Answer 1

You may find this blog post useful: http://davidpallmann.blogspot.in/2012/07/windows-azure-is-3-lane-highway-how-to.html

In short, think of Windows Azure Websites as an equivalent to shared hosting. You don't get much freedom and flexibility. Windows Azure Cloud Services (web role/worker role) is Windows Azure PaaS offering and gives you more control while still not worrying about managing the VMs however you will need to play by the rules Windows Azure has set (i.e. deploying applications in a certain way). Then there is Windows Azure Virtual Machines which is Windows Azure IaaS offering which gives you greatest flexibility however the responsibility of managing the VMs is yours.

To answer your question, you can't add startup tasks with Azure websites, simply because you don't have exclusive access to the VM. For this, you would need to go PaaS or IaaS route.

Answer 2

Above you have got great information to know more about Windows Azure Websites. One thing I would like to add about Windows Azure Websites and Web Role Comparison, is that Windows Azure Websites could be same as powerful as Web Roles in terms of serving as web application however you are very limited to have control over infrastructure as you do with Web Role or Windows Azure VM. And if you don't want to focus on that then Windows Azure Websites is the best option where you can consolidate full energy in your application.

You can build a full scale Windows Azure Websites in reserve mode (reserve mode let your application run in a dedicated VM of 1/2/4 core) and with multiple instances your website will become very powerful. With websites you can just use git (or any other available method) to do application deployment and updates will be available instantly. So overall it is less overhead on your development/deployment cycle comparative to web/worker role but you are limited to what you could do.

With Websites you would configure monitoring directly from port and configure limited monitoring as seen below:

After monitoring is configured you can see the monitoring on portal in real time or you can collect log directly by accessing the LogFiles folder over FTP as shows in Preview Portal.

So there is not a lot you can dig about diagnostics from the VM directly. Also if you have reserve instance, you can write some code in your ASP.NET application to some of the system specific details directly in your web application if applicable.