Shared codebase Azure cloud service

Question

we want to deploy a webrole on the Azure cloud service (PaaS) we have multiple Virtual Applications that have exactly the same codebase (dlls) but different web.configs

this leads to multiple time the same dll's in the package to upload; resulting in a very large package file

is there any way to share the bin folder for these 'same' Virtual Applications to minimize the size of the package?

greetings, Tim

Answer 1

1. Create a cloud application with one web role containing the codebase and additional web roles containing only the Web.config for the multiple virtual applications.
2. On ServiceDefinition.csdef, define the virtual applications for the roles as required.
3. Set a startup task to copy the contents from the complete web role to each of the additional virtual applications. This will be executed at role initialization time, with administrator privileges.

This way your deployment package won't need to include multiple copies of the same artifacts, and the virtual applications will be set up when the role instance is initialized.

Answer 2

Is it possible for you to load your configuration settings based on the host header or incoming request?

In the past we had configuration settings stored in Azure Blob Storage that were loaded (and then cached) based upon the host header. This allows you to load what is identically the same site except for the specific settings for that client.

In essence this is a multi-tenant application.