Continous Integration Server in Windows Azure

Question

I would like use a continuous integration system in my projects. However, I don\'t want to use a server sitting in my office, instead I\'d like my continuous integration ser

Answer 1

It sounds like you are trying to use Azure as an infrastructure provider, which runs a VM where your builds happen.

This is not a particularly good use-case for Azure. Azure is a platform to run your custom-built applications. While it does provide VM's similarly to Amazon or other IaaS cloud providers, those VM's are "stateless", can go up and down at will and meant to act as application servers where more than one can be up at any given time.

You can probably get this to work on an Azure VM but I am not sure if the pain would be worth it.

Azure's instances are application servers, not "windows servers".

HTH

Answer 2

I have installed Jenkins on Windows Azure, it works very well for me.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gongcheng/archive/2013/02/27/jenkins-on-windows-azure-the-missing-manual.aspx

Answer 3

We use the Build Manager in Team Foundation Server to push our automated builds to Azure. We set up our Azure hosted services to allow for Web Publish through remote desktop using this plugin - http://dunnry.com/blog/2010/12/20/UsingWebDeployWithWindowsAzure.aspx

You do not need to involve Team Foundation Server to use the plugin - you can set up your instances to publish to azure instantaneously through Visual Studio Web Publish without CI.

I think there are two parts to the Azure CI solution - automated builds from your source control and actually pushing the bits to azure. The plugin makes the publish to Azure much, much faster. So if you want real time access to changes on Azure, you will need to look into the plugin.