How are the “Cloud Services” created for Virtual Machines and Azure Cloud Services related?

Question

When you create an Azure VM, it has to be placed into a Cloud Service (either new or existing).

Is that the exact same logical structure as an Azure Cloud Service that's created when deploying Web and Worker roles via Visual Studio?

Can I deploy Roles from VS into a Cloud Service created via VM creation? I can deploy a VM into a Cloud Service created via VS deployment? If either of those are true, how does that "free-standing" VM relate to the Role VMs? Is it just floating inside the Cloud Service independently from the Role VMs?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

This really should be on ServerFault, and the question will likely be closed, but...

Treat "cloud service" as a wrapper around either a collection of web and worker role instances or a collection of Virtual Machines, behind a single xyz.cloudapp.net namespace. Both are equivalent to the outside world (that is, accessing a service+endpoint via xyz.cloudapp.net:port). But managed differently.

Virtual Machines cannot be mixed with web/worker role instances in the same cloud service.