How do I deploy my Java Application to Azure Cloud Service(not VM or App Service) using a WAR file?

Question

I need to deploy my Java application on Azure Cloud Service. I don't want the extra overhead that comes with managing my own machines using Azure VM, which is an IaaS, nor do I want to use App Service, since the max cores per machine is 4- My application is very compute intensive and I would like to use at least 16 cores per instance, which Azure Cloud Services provides(D5v2 instances).

My build system is Maven and I would like to use something like Codeship to build my .war and deploy it to Azure Cloud services(rather than using the Azure Eclipse SDK to manually Publish to Azure Cloud Services). I've spent hours on the Azure documentation, but haven't found any way of doing this.(Azure App Service has a simple 'upload a war to deploy' model. I dont know why the same isn't there for cloud services: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/documentation/articles/web-sites-java-get-started/ ).

Answer 1

Remember that Cloud Services are the original deployment mechanism for Azure, dating back to 2010 (ok, 2009 if you want to count pre-production days). The .cspkg format is pretty much the same as it ever has been. The Web Apps deployment mechanism is completely different.

Eclipse (on Windows) has a specific plugin available for constructing .cspkg which you can then automate deploying, via PowerShell or CLI.

Alternatively, you can bundle your .war files within a .cspkg generated by Visual Studio, and then get things started within `OnStart(). Again, you can automate deployment from scripts - no need to ever publish directly from within an IDE.

Also: There's nothing stopping you from your automation process pushing .war files to blob storage (or somewhere else) and then sending your app some type of message letting it know to update itself. At that point, there's no redeployment of a .cspkg - rather, it's just downloading a new .war to running web/worker instances and restarting the java process.

Answer 2

@DylanColaco, As @DavidMakogon said, you can install the plugins named azure-tools-for-java for Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA to deploy your war file as web/worker role instance into cloud service.

And there is an offical tutorial which shows how to getstarted.

As references, you can refer to the article lists and a very helpful vedio at Channel 9 below.

• For Eclipse, https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/azure-toolkit-for-eclipse/
• For IntelliJ, https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/azure-toolkit-for-intellij/
• Java Applications in Windows Azure Cloud Services using Eclipse