How do I create a copy of my application in Windows Azure?

Question

I have made a small application in Windows Azure. For research purposes they asked me to research this scenario, and I can't seem to find any good information on it.

In short scenario (not real): The application works fine for 1 company but because we are an IT firm we want to expand this application and make it available for other companies. It's like making a copy of the application that would use another database for storage and this for each company we want to offer it to.

What is the best way to approach this in Windows Azure?

Answer 1

You can either:

• deploy your app to multiple hosted services (e.g. myapp1.cloudapp.net, myapp2.cloudapp.net, etc.) and have each deployment use different settings in the service configuration (such as database connection and storage account)
• Make changes to your app to support multiple tenants

Deploying to multiple hosted services is simple, as you have a single deployment package. Just upload it to blob storage, then use it as the basis for your deployment to each hosted service. You'll just need to specify a different configuration file for each. This is why the configuration file is kept separate from the deployment package, as it allows you to update things like database connection strings without having to re-package your app.