Staging with a multi-tenant app in Azure Cloud Services

Question

I'm reviewing the following article on staging Cloud Services:

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/staging-deployment/

I'm trying to define a deployment strategy for application updates and it seems like the above works wonderfully for non-multi-tenant apps. In my case, I have a dependency on the VIP staying static, as it is used in my A records because I need wildcard support - *.xyz.com > VIP.

What other alternatives are there to achieve seamless app updates? Or - should I be using wildcard CNAMEs instead? The latter will introduce more complications as my current DNS provider (GoDaddy) does not support wildcard CNAME records... so Route53 or something like that would have to be used. Any guidance here would be fantastic.

Answer 1

Using staging deployments and VIP swap is the only supported way to have seamless updates.

Sometimes you will be advised to make in-place upgrades - that's a Bad Idea™ because once it starts and breaks at least some of your instances you can't revert it and so you cannot rely on it in production use. Yes, it can work for quickly testing changes in a testing environment but it's not for serious business.

Yes, you have to use CNAME because your VIPs will change on each "swap VIP" redeployment. If you feel like you need wildcards - you have two options - ether find a provider who has them or redesign your application so that wildcards are not needed.