CODEWITHSUNDEEP
azureazure-worker-roles
BozoJoe
BozoJoe

Reputation: 6452

Windows Services into Azure WorkerRoles

What is established best practice in porting a Windows Service to Azure? Should it be changed into a Worker Role or moved into a VM Role? Are there other options? Assume that my services write to external persistence sources (MSMQ, databases, WCF) rather than to the file system directly.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1497

Answers (3)

sebastus
sebastus

Reputation: 360

I wrote a blog post about this a while back. It is here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/golive/archive/2011/02/11/installing-a-windows-service-in-a-worker-role.aspx

Note that a Windows Service won't communicate directly with the fabric controller, so you need to ping it periodically to check health, then take remediative actions as needed.

Putting a Windows Service into a worker or web role is accepted practice. The main reason to go with VM Role is if there is significant (>10 minutes) setup required. My blog post details how to install your service.

Of course, if you want to move the code into a worker role, that's also fine. In this case you don't need any special steps to ensure the fabric controller is aware of its health.

If cost is an issue, combining functions into web/worker is also accepted practice. And you can save by not working over your code to get it into a web/worker.

Upvotes: 0

Graham Wright
Graham Wright

Reputation: 646

Azure has a special type of Web Role called "WCF Service Web Role" which corresponds to a Windows WCF Service. This is a good point for migrating existing services. Ideally the migration should be followed by taking advantage of Azure specific features, for instance using queues and work roles to maximise perfromance and scalability.

Upvotes: -1

Igorek
Igorek

Reputation: 15850

You are far better off converting your Windows Services to Worker-Roles than VM roles. VM roles are meant to house applications that require complex un-automatable installation procedures. They are also a bigger pain to manage and you want to stay away from VM roles as much as possible. If you can find a way to automate deployment of your existing Windows Services via Worker-Roles, it is definitely the way to go.

You can also looking into HPC roles and depending on the on-prem/off-prem and load/compute requirements, adding Azure machines to your HPC cluster maybe of benefit.

All types of Roles (Web/Worker/VM/HPC) are stateless and require to be able to spin-up or tear-down from scratch on demand. All types of Roles are meant to run more than one VM instance at a time.

HTH

Upvotes: 2

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