Produce Static IP address for hosting wcf service in web role on Azure

Question

We are developing the service which is going to be hosted in web role in Azure. We are going to tieup with third party service to get data. But we have to give static ip address for registration of our service with third party. There is no concept ofstatic ip adress in Azure. I am also aware about virtual IP but it will keep on changes when there is new deployment or creating new instance of web role. Please help us and tell me what and how I can resolve this issue.

Note: Third party has given a example of Amazon. Amazon's EC2 for instance has Elastic IP Addresses which are "static ip addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing."

I was just reading the article on MSDN about VIP in Azure for hosted service. I got below information.

"Throughout the lifetime of a deployment, the VIP assigned will not change, regardless of the operations on the deployment, including updates, reboots, and reimaging the OS. The VIP for a given deployment will persist until that deployment is deleted. When a customer swaps the VIP between a stage and production deployment in a single hosted service, both deployment VIPs are persisted. A VIP is associated with the deployment and not the hosted service. When a deployment is deleted, the VIP associated with that deployment will return to the pool and be re-assigned accordingly, even if the hosted service is not deleted. Windows Azure currently does not support a customer reserving a VIP outside of the lifetime of a deployment."

Question: If I want to scale up my serive on Azure and need to have multiple instances of Web role, still the VIP would be same for that service which is deployed.

Answer 1

Since today Microsoft Azure now finally has something similar to Amazon's Elastic IP! The feature is called Virtual IP (details, pricing).

Answer 2

As long as you don't delete and redeploy, your app will maintain its assigned IP address. See this article for specifics.

As of October 2011, there are additional ways to update your deployment without requiring a delete+redeploy, including:

• Changing the virtual machine size (scale-up or scale-down)
• Increasing local storage
• Adding or removing roles to a deployment
• Changing the number or type of endpoints

More details are in this article.

Answer 3

This gets pretty complicated and the VIP becomes super important once you start integrating Office 365 - Exchange Online, domain name services (CNAME, hosting) and everything has to play nice and its all tied to having a "semi-static VIP"

I have used the VIP for 6 months now (tied to a domain, CNAME address etc) and mine has not changed at all..the compute instance has gone down, but came back up with no problem and the same VIP was used. I have not done any kind of deletes or anything like that..I have also done the swap VIP and that works as well and keeps both VIP.

I would recommend using the Enterprise Azure Scaling libraries to ensure that the VIP is maintained throughout the lifetime of your deployments. Also it is rumored that the new SLAs will give you a %99.95 uptime SLA with a single instance in a couple months (source: Mary Jo Foley's articles).