What is the difference between an Azure Web Site and an Azure Web Role

Question

What are the material differences between the new Azure Web Sites and the traditional Azure Web Roles for an ASP.NET MVC application? What reason would I choose a \"web sit

Answer 1

Azure Websites, Web Workers and Virtual Machines are three different computing approaches available on Windows Azure. They differ in the level of control and responsibilities:

• Azure Website have lowest level of control, but you don't care about keeping in health virtual machine and IIS, because Azure stuff do this for you
• Web Roles give you more control (traffic manager, remote desktop), but more administration is possible on your side which means that you can break something via remote desktop for example
• Virtual Machines gives you full control of VM, so require the most administration efforts.

There is no one best choice, because it depends on what level of control you need, what features you need and what you want to leave Azure stuff to maintain. And it is big topic..

Please look at this articles for more information to make more informed choice:

• http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/articles/choose-web-site-cloud-service-vm/
• http://davidpallmann.blogspot.com/2012/06/reintroducing-windows-azure-part-2.html

It boils down to tradeoff between ease of use and capabilities.