Worker Role third-party software

Question

We have third-party software hosted in Azure Virtual Machines. This software hosts a service which is consumed by one of our Cloud Service Web Roles.

The issue is that the network latency between the VM and the Web Role is significantly affecting the performance of our application.

A solution would be to publish this third-party software in the same Cloud Service (in a Worker Role) .

VM Role sounds like a good implementation for the above problem . Unfortunately this is a deprecated service!

One idea would be to package the relevant installation scripts and files into a Visual Studio project and configure the ServiceDefinition to set up the software accordingly. The concern here is that the installation files are over 1Gb.

Is there currently any Azure service that can support my problem? Is there a replacement to the VM Role?

Answer 1

Though a bit old, but you may want to take a look at Azure Bootstraper on CodePlex. From the project description page:

The Windows Azure Bootstrapper is a command line tool meant to be used by your running Web and Worker roles in Windows Azure. This tool allows you to easily download resources (either public resources or ones in your blob storage), extract them if necessary, and launch them. Since you don't want to always download and run during restarts, it will also help track those dependencies and only launch an installer one time! In addition, there are some very useful features that make it a great tool to package with your roles.

Yet another idea (though I have not tried it) would be to make use of Azure File Service . What you could do is upload the installers in an Azure File Service share and then mount the share in your Cloud Service VMs and use it as a drive on your VM. You should be able to install software that way.

Answer 2

You're right that bundling 3rd-party software inside the cspkg can be problematic, size-wise.

It's common practice to download needed software from either a startup command file (.cmd) or from OnStart() . These downloads can be sourced from anywhere that you have access to: Azure blob storage, the actual vendors themselves (eg download from their public download link), etc. In your startup script, you'd need to handle the downloading (and potential unzipping) into a local folder, then installing as necessary.