Can azure VM sizes be configured by service configuration?

Question

I want to deploy different VM sizes in my Azure deployments, depending on which cloud service is the target (e.g., I want bigger instances in production, but can get by with smaller ones in testing). It appears in visual studio 2010 that the sizes must be the same across all service configurations.

Is there a workaround, or is this just the way it is?

Answer 1

The best workaround I've found is to have two different cloud projects. So basically you just create two different cloud projects, add all the same roles into each of them, but have different configurations in each. You just have to be careful to update all the configurations in both places every time you change it. This amounts to having two CSDEFs, as Brent the Programming Simian mentioned already, this is just a concrete way to achieve that.

This also gives you flexibility in other ways. For example, you can have a test site with both HTTP and HTTPS endpoints, but the production site can have only HTTPS.