When should I repackage my Azure compute role?

Question

When setting up an Azure Web / Worker Role for the first time I need to 'Package' the project and upload it via the Azure portal. After doing this I can 'Publish' the application from Visual Studio.

Under which circumstances do I need to 'Package' the project again and update it via the Azure portal?
In other words - which changes require the project to be re-packaged?

Note: I need to 'Package' the project in order to upload it via the Azure portal. When I create a Compute Role in Azure, I must upload a package in order to be make the Compute Role operational.

From Azure portal:
You have nothing deployed to the production environment.
UPLOAD A NEW PRODUCTION DEPLOYMENT.

Answer 1

I don't think you must package your project at the first time. You can publish your azure project for the first time. I'm not sure what prevent from your publishing. Could you explain a bit more.

I fact, the publish is very similar as package. Visual studio just packaged the project and uploaded them to azure on behalf of you.

Answer 2

The Cloud Service package contains the role definitions, configuration settings, runtime bits, and other static content bundled with your app. Visual Studio (or PowerShell) creates an encrypted package (actually a zip file that you can look into, when building for emulator) for upload to the named slot you created via the portal.

In the future, there are certain things you can do without rebuilding the package, such as changing instance count and other configuration settings. Also: If you move your static content (such as your CSS, images, etc.) to blob storage, you can then update those directly without ever needing to recreate / redeploy the package (you may need to send some type of signal to your running app, to reload some resources, but that's going to be app-specific). If you have specific exe's or MSI's that get installed as part of your startup scripts, you can move these to blob storage as well, since they can easily be downloaded as your role startup code executes (and this cuts down on package size).

If you change anything defined exclusively in the service definition file (e.g. if you add a role or change a role size), you will have to repackage/redeploy (but you can deploy as an update, which won't take your service down [assuming you have 2 or more instances] or replace your assigned IP address).