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

EDIT 2014: For what it's worth, a lot of the info in this answer is no longer correct - see comments.

Add more to @David response:

With Windows Azure Websites, you don't have control over IIS or web Server because you are using a resources slice along with hundreds of other website on the same machine, you are sharing resources like any other so there is no control over IIS.

The big difference between a website shared and Azure web role is that a web-site is considered process bound while roles are VM bound.

Websites are stored on a content share which is accessible from all the "web servers" in the farm so there is no replication or anything like that required.

Windows Azure websites can not have their own host name instead they must use websitename.azurewebsites.net only and you sure can use CNAME setting in your DNS provider to route your request exactly same with previous Windows Azure Role only when they are running in reserved mode. CNAME setting is not supported for shared websites.

Answer 2

I've just posted a comprehensive blog post on this very subject at http://robdmoore.id.au/blog/2012/06/09/windows-azure-web-sites-vs-web-roles/.

An excerpt from my conclusion: If you need enormous scale, SSL, Asian or West US data centres, a non-standard configuration (of IIS, ports, diagnostics, security certs or start up scripts), RDP or cost-effective Worker Roles (combined with your Web Role) then you are going to have to stick to Web Roles for now.

Otherwise, Web Sites is a great option!

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

A web role is a virtual machine that hosts multiple websites