Partial Service Upgrades

So I as working on an answer for a stack overflow question yesterday and realized it was a topic that I hadn’t put down in my blog yet. So rather than just answer the question, I figured I’d blog about it here so I could include some screen shots and further explanation. The question was essentially how can I control the deployment of individual parts of my service.

So for this, I create a simple Windows Azure service with a Web Role, and a Worker Role. Its already up and hosted when we start this.

NOTE: this post only details doing this via the windows.azure.com portal. We’ll leave doing I programmatically via the management API for another day.

Upgrading a Single Role

This is actually surprising simple. I open up the service, and select the role (not instances) I want to upgrade. Then we can right click and select upgrade, or click on the “upgrade” button on the toolbar.

Either option will launch the “Upgrade Deployment” diaglog box. If you look at this box (and presuming you have the role selected, you’ll notice that in the box, the “Role to Upgrade” option will list the role you had selected. If you didn’t properly select the role, this may list “All”.

Take a peek at the highlighted section of the following screen shot for an example of how this should look.

Note: while creating this post, I did receive an unhandled exception message from the silverlight portal. This has been reported to MSFT and I’ll update his when I get a response.

Manual Upgrades

I’ve run out of time today, but next time I’d like to cover doing a manual upgrade. Of course, I still have two posts in my PHP series I need to finish. So we’ll see which of these I eventually get back around to first.

Until next time!

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