Don’t Delete That Azure Service!

I’m having some serious fun with Azure these days. I have my own pet project, but I also have several small “demo” projects where I’m demonstrating something for various clients. Each of these demos has its own Azure service.

An Azure Service is the place where you upload an application to: your web roles, your worker roles, storage. It has all your regional settings (such as geographic affinity), and manages how many instances you want to run for each web role and worker role. And, of course, the Azure service gets its own name within the cloudapp.net domain (e.g. http://YourServiceName.cloudapp.net).

Once you upload code to an instance, you start incurring usage metering. However, you may create an Azure services without deploying any code,  which means no cost incurred. This lets you get things all set up, and eventually upload something for testing. Then, when you’re moving back to the development fabric to continue development, you can simply delete the deployment (but leave the Azure service definition intact). This lets you save those precious monthly compute-hours for when you really need ‘em (see my post here for more details about monthly hours).

Up until today, you were able to create up to 20 hosted services within your account. Maybe that seems like a lot, but imagine you’re a consultant working on several Azure projects, maybe some for clients, some for yourself. And maybe you’re trying out a few demos based on some training material. Or you’re testing out a demo for a user group talk. Suddenly, that 20-service limit seems pretty reasonable. It’s nice to get things all set up for each project, and not have to worry about configuring them again. It’s also nice to not worry about setting up cloudapp.net names (or losing the one you found, because someone else snagged it after you deleted it).

Well… as of today, each account is now capped at six Azure services. Don’t panic! If you currently have more than six configured services, they will not be deleted by Azure; you’re grandfathered. But… if you delete them, you won’t be able to re-add them until you’re below the six-service limit.

For more details about today’s Azure service changes, see this blog post by the Azure team.

So my words of wisdom today are, simply: Don’t delete that Azure service!