When are Azure Cloud Service virtual machine recreated

Question

I have a cloud service project with deployment settings

• "Delete deplyment on failure" - unchecked
• "Deployment update" - checked
  • "If deployment can't be updated, do a full deployment" - unchecked

When I deploy a new version it seems the virtual machine is always intact and it just creates a new disk with my code which it attaches as either E: or F:.

Will a deployment ever create a new vm or will it always use the existing vm. Will new VMs only be created when the VM template is updated?

Answer 1

From our experience, Cloud Services Updates will always use the current deployed instances, they won't create new ones, unless you are modifying the amount or size of instances: Taken from here

You might want to consider having a Staging / Production pair of environments and doing a Swap.

When we used Cloud Services, our Staging environment was always empty, we deployed there, then swapped and then deleted the Staging (former Production) deployment.