How to Create a Hosted Service

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How to Create a Hosted Service on Windows Azure

To create a hosted service

1. Log into the Windows Azure Platform Management Portal.
2. On the ribbon, click New Hosted Service. This will open the Create a New Hosted Servicewindow.
3. On the Create a new Hosted Service window select a subscription to add the hosted service to from the Choose a Subscription dropdown.
4. In Enter a name for your service, type a name for this service. This will help you identify this particular service when you have deployed multiple services.
5. In Enter a URL for your service, type a subdomain name to create the URL at which your service will be available.
   
   Important
   This subdomain name must be unique among all the services, yours or anyone else’s, running on Windows Azure.
6. If you have created Affinity groups and you want to assign this service to a particular group, click the radio button next to the Affinity Group dropdown. Otherwise leave the default setting of No Affinity.
7. From Choose a region select the region
   
   TipAffinity groups and regions allow you to organize your hosted service and storage account within geographic region for optimal performance.
8. If you are not deploying a package to the service at this time, click Do not deploy, and then click OK.

If you are deploying a service at this time follow the procedure in the next section.

When you deploy a service you can choose to deploy to either the staging environment or the production environment. A service deployed to the staging environment is assigned a URL with the following format: {deploymentid}.cloudapp.net. A service deployed to the production environment is assigned a URL with the following format: {hostedservicename}.cloudapp.net. The staging environment is useful as a test bed for your service prior to going live with it. In addition, when you are ready to go live, it is faster to swap VIPS to move your service to the production environment than to deploy it directly there. For more information on swapping VIPs, see How to Swap a Service’s VIPs.
To deploy a service

1. Click either Deploy to production environment or Deploy to stage environment.
2. If you do not want the service to run once it is deployed, clear Start after successful deployment.
3. In Deployment name, type a name for this deployment.
4. In Package Location, click Browse, go to your application directory, and click the service package (cspkg) file.
5. In Configuration file, click Browse, and then click the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file.
6. Click OK.