A Same Name "Cloud Service" will be created when create "Virtual Machine" in Azure, can I delete it?

Question

A same name "Cloud Service" will be created when create "Virtual Machine" in Azure.

My question is:

A: What is the same name "Cloud Service" for?

B: Can I delete the one exist in "Cloud Service", which is empty, no deployment in neither production nor stage.

C: If I delete it, will it effect "Virtual Machine" I created?

D: If I delete it, can I recreate it with the same name later?

Answer 1

A. It's a wrapper for the deployment of the Virtual Machine and essentially the same construct you get for Web and Worker role deployment in the PaaS model.

When you create a new Virtual Machine from the portal, you actually won't see that there is a Cloud Service also created unless you switch back to the "old" Silverlight portal.

B. If the Cloud Service is empty, you don't really have a virtual machine running in it, so you can delete it.

Did you create an image from it (sysprep)? That would detach it from the Cloud Service, and because it's detached, the portal will now show you have an empty Cloud Service. The "new" portal used to show the "empty" Cloud Service, but I just tried it and it doesn't appear; although it does, of course, show up in the "old" portal.

The Cloud Service was always there, but the portal hides it when it thinks you don't need to know about it :). You'll will also see a Cloud Service in the "new" portal if you create a few 'connected VMs' because now the Service is more than a trivial wrapper for a single VM.

C. If the Cloud Service is showing now deployments, you can delete it without concern.

D. Sort of. Once you delete the Cloud Service, you can reuse that Cloud Service's name; however, if you decide to create another VM of the same name AND the assets for that VM - the image and/or disk remain, you may get a failure if you use the 'quick create' options. That's because those options will create names for the disk and image based off of the DNS (aka Cloud Service) name you provide. If the disk/image from the old VM are still around, you'll get a conflict and the creation will fail. It's not failing because of the Cloud Service name itself though.

You might find a blog post I did on VMs with CouchBase helpful, as I walk through a variety of scenarios and touch upon some of your questions. The fact it's CouchBase is secondary.