Azure Web Apps or Cloud Service for hosting WCF Integration Service

6
votes

I need to deploy a .NET WCF integration service to the Azure platform which should be low maintenance after deploy. The service uses SQL Databases and will need to access some form of storage like Blobs.

My question is would a Web App be sufficient or do I need a cloud service?

Note: I'm a bit confused on the difference between Azure Web Apps and Web Sites. All documentation refers to Web Sites (which I understand) but in my Azure portal I only see Cloud Services, VM's and Web Apps. For now I assume when documentation refers to web sites it is an old naming to what is now web apps?

1
.netweb-serviceswcfazureintegration
Web Apps is the same as Websites. It's been rebranded as part of Azure App Service. The answer to whether a Web App will suffice or you need Cloud Service largely depends on what your WCF bits does...e.g., does it require 3rd party components, do you use non-standard protocols, etc... – JuneT
Noted on Web apps thanks. The service should not require 3'rd party components or non standard protocols. Futher it is to be re-factored to make it fit on its deployed environment (for ex currently its using disk access which will be removed). So its more about having WCF capability over https with minimal future maintenance – Pierre

1 Answers

3
votes

I have been experimenting with this myself. I had initially deployed my WCF service which has similar requirements to yours (blob access etc.) using a cloud service.

This worked perfectly well, but from a billing perspective you are billed for compute hours the entire time the service is running because as I understand it runs within it's own VM.

I have recently followed this blog article

http://genuinebasil.com/blog/wcf-service-over-azure-web-site/

I converted my cloud service to a Web App and for me, this has been functionally identical to the cloud service deployment.