Creating a Virtual Machine in Azure also creates a Cloud Service

Question

From the documentation

When you create an application and run it in Azure, the code and configuration together are called an Azure cloud service (known as a hosted service in earlier Azure releases).

By creating a cloud service, you can deploy a multi-tier application in Azure, defining multiple roles to distribute processing and allow flexible scaling of your application. A cloud service consists of one or more web roles and/or worker roles, each with its own application files and configuration.

My understanding is that Virtual Machines in Azure are self managed and have no concepts of roles, so why does creating a Virtual Machine in Azure also create a Cloud Service.

Answer 1

This occurs because the Cloud Service is a hosting container. It wraps up the internals for having a public IP address and a lot more. When VMs are created they need to be hosted and thus are placed into a Cloud Service. You can host more than one VM in the same cloud service. This used to be somewhat hidden from you, but now it is just more transparent that this is what is going on.

The "Cloud Service" deployment model with roles are also just being deployed into this same type of container. Unfortunately that deployment has the same name as the container which can lead to this confusion.

In the end both deployment models are spinning up virtual machines into a hosting container that is a trust and network boundary. One model gives you a lot more control over the virtual machine and the other removes more of the control but streamlines your responsibilities. Microsoft keeps saying that this line between IaaS and PaaS is blurring and becoming more grey.