I have a blank Solution in .Net and add two Azure Cloud Services project in solution. One with WebRole and other with WorkerRole. Can I host the both project in one cloudservice instance or need separate for both.
Within a single cloud service, you may certainly have multiple roles, a combination of web and worker roles, each with their own specific projects within your Visual Studio solution.
When you deploy, you'll have yourapp.cloudapp.net with all of your roles (at least one instance of each).
Your question is a bit unclear about what you're looking for, regarding solutions and project. But... All roles which must coexist within a .cloudapp.net deployment must all be within a single Visual Studio solution. You cannot combine roles from multiple Cloud Service solutions.
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In azure I have a few web apps running using the same database.
But the data never clashes or anything; it's like azure has partitioned the database somehow.
I would like two web apps under different domains to access the same data with a separate api project.
What is the best way to configure this project in azure?
And in visual studio? Can I have them all in the same solution and publish them to the right place?
In Azure, you should setup one Azure SQL Database and multiple API Apps / Web Apps that all use the same connection string pointing to that database.
In Visual Studio, the best way to configure it depends on a couple of things.
If the WebAPIs are exactly the same just with a different domain
You can setup multiple publish profiles for a single Web Application Project. These publish profiles can tie to different release configurations which can transform things in your web.config to account for the differing domains. This is particularly important when using SSL, authentication or something like that.
If the WebAPIs are different for each domain
In this case, you will likely have different projects for each distinct WebAPI. You can have them all in one solution or separate solutions. It might be easier to setup different solutions if you want to enable automated build using Visual Studio Online or something as the Visual Studio build task keys off the *.sln file and if you have multiple Web Application projects in one solution your build outputs will be mixed up which can cause some issues when deploying.
I have an azure project with two different web roles. I would like the different roles to be deployed to different services, not the same service. Is this possible, or do I need to create a separate azure project in visual studio?
You need to create a separate cloud service project. Although there might be a better way to accomplish your ultimate goal if you want to share more details about what you are trying to do. For example, you can host multiple sites within the same WebRole and use host headers to differentiate the traffic. This limits your scalability options (ie. you can't scale Website1 independently of Website2), but it can reduce costs if the load on the sites is low.
Posts seem to conflict in their description of how best to get web.config settings into an Azure worker role. Some posts say you need to create WaIISHost.exe.config, set output to always then copy relevant web.config info to that file. Other posts describe creation of app.config instead of WaIISHost.exe. Which is correct?
The answer to this depends a bit on the version of the SDK you are using. First and foremost, the WaIISHost.exe.config is only applicable to Web Roles (not worker roles). Worker Roles use and continue to use app.config for their configuration settings. I am going to assume here that you are trying to configure a Web Role's RoleEntryPoint in config settings.
Now, for Web Roles: If you are using the latest SDK (1.8 at time of writing), you will find that creating a WaIISHost.exe.config file (and copy local, etc.) no longer works. Something has changed in the latest SDK and it will no longer pull those values. For earlier versions of the SDK, this is still how you do it. For the latest version (and likely next versions) 1.8, you can create an app.config. When you do that, it will actually create a file in your bin directory like "WebRoleProjectName.dll.config". You DO NOT have to create this file manually yourself and "Copy Local". Simply create the app.config like you normally would and you will find that your RoleEntryPoint in the Web Role can be configured just fine like that.
In your previous SO post, I suggested that you would need to spend some time to understand both Windows Azure websites and Windows Azure Cloud services as you are mixing together.
Like above you are mixing web and worker role together. WaIISHost.exe is the Windows Azure Web Role Host process which is responsible for loading and running your Web Role DLL. This process has nothing to do with Worker role because it is not even existing in a Windows Azure Worker Role. This process will be only available to Web Roles. And because of that your question above "WaIISHost.exe.config vs. app.config for worker role config" is irrelevant.
App.config configuration is used with both Web Role and Worker Role, however web.config is only used with your web application. So if you want to configure Roles only you can use app.config (both with web and worker role) however for web site configuration you can use web.config.
IF you just write what your final objective is in simple word, you sure will get exact assistance and suggestion on how to do it.
We are thinking of using Windows Azure for simulation. ~100 VM nodes each working on it's problem set and reporting back the result to a Master node.
I have created VM instances from the web UI. In order for this to work, we would need to use Azure API to bring servers up and shut them down once they are done.
Does anyone have any experience with something like this? I am looking for advise, gotchas etc.
thanks.
You sure can do it and I have helped other to make it happen on hundreds on nodes. Take a look at Windows Azure Rest API to configure your role as described here. While others may have other idea, I think the general steps would be as below:
Create a master machine or a webrole to manage your roles using REST API
Create a worker role instance and use it to clone multiple instances as if needed
Use REST API to start and shutdown worker role along with update the instance count when in need
Use Azure Boot Strapper to bootstrap the VM depend on your requirement
Azure REST based Service Management API can work from a web app or a standalone app, so you can also have a web role to make it happen from anywhere in world. This way you don't need any on premise components at all as it will be totally cloud solution. If you need any help on creating web role I sure can help.
You can provision Virtual Machines using Service Management REST API (there's also a managed API on NuGet).
But in your case you might want to consider using Cloud Services (PaaS). With Cloud Services you simply build your application, you package it and deploy it. Then using the portal or the management API you can simply configure the number of instances. There is even a command line tool (csmanage.exe) which allows you to to change the number of instances through the service configuration.
I'm curious to know if this is possible, and if so, is it a good or bad idea?
We are developing an Azure application that is largely centered around worker roles that receive their work on a CloudQueue, and put the results in a CloudBlob, that the client then downloads. The web interface itself is a dead-simple ASP.NET MVC site that throws jobs in the CloudQueue, and builds URLs to download CloudBlobs.
Currently we accomplish this by having a Azure Cloud Project in our solution, which has a Web Role with the UI, and Worker Roles with the actual work.
Could we use Azure Websites to publish and host the UI, which calls back to our Worker Roles? The Azure DLLs are just regular old .NET libraries, I'm assuming Azure Websites won't have a problem with them. So, when we want to update the UI, we just publish with Visual Studio. And when we want to update the Worker Role - which is 300MB+ and has a bunch of nasty dependencies like Crystal Reports - we can build the cloud bundle and update the Cloud Service through the Azure management portal.
This seems to me like doing this would make it easier to update the UI. I think it would also be cheaper to host it, as we won't have to buy a bunch of instances for the Web Role.
If your question is "Could we use Windows Azure Websites*", based on your application architecture, you sure can use Azure Website to deploy your front end and configure all the networking connection properly so you can continue access other Azure Storage services. As you are using mostly Blob and Queue, you can continue use HTTP/HTTPS settings in the Azure websites. You can keep worker role by as it is however if it is very complex to deploy, using Windows Azure VM may be another direction to go.
I could say website deployment could be easier if your web app does not have something complex to configure in web server as websites may not be able to match web server level configuration compare to webrole and Azure VM. Answering "Easier and cheap" could be very subjective as this is all depend on load and distribution so you would have to try and evaluate it.