Deploying my Azure application to my Company local Windows Server

Question

I am new to Windows Azure and need help with deploying my Azure application, which is correctly deployed to Azure, to a local server.

My application consists of one Web Role, which contains a Silverlight client for a Silverlight application.

I installed and configured windows server appfabric on the server and the server is actually ready. But I don't know how can I deploy/publish the application.

To deploy to Azure, i created the .cspkg file using the publish option in the right click on Azure application. And then deployed the generated files to Azure using azure management portal. how can i do something like that for the local server?

Answer 1

Windows Azure provides an emulator environment that runs on your development machine. You may either run a Windows Azure app in that emulator, or publish to Windows Azure. There's no option to deploy a Windows Azure application to Windows Server.

While some of the services offered are similar (such as cache), Windows Server AppFabric is not equivalent to the services provided by Windows Azure, and there's no equivalent fabric controller that runs on Windows Server.

EDIT: Adding clarification per @Asmaa's comments.

Building a private cloud is not the same as creating a local version of Windows Azure. The Private Cloud you reference is essentially a set of Windows Servers running virtual machines managed by Hyper-V, and some type of local storage. You'd be fully responsible for replication, disaster recovery, durable storage (where storage survives even with a disk crash), scaling, etc.

Windows Azure provides the abovementioned features, but only within its data centers. As @Avkash mentioned, there is a Windows Azure Appliance, but it there are only a handful in existence and they're huge (as in made for a data center).

If the objective is to run your code either locally or in Windows Azure, this can be done, but not by pushing the Windows Azure package to your Windows Servers. You'd need to build separate solutions to run your code in the two environments. You can reuse your core code if it's packaged correctly, but the notion of the Role Environment, Diagnostics, and other Windows Azure features would need to be replaced with something else.

One last thing: if you want to build a hybrid app, where some of it is deployed locally and some to Windows Azure, then there are certainly ways to bridge the two. See this article for more info.

Answer 2

The bottom line is that you can not deploy Azure Application to Windows Server machines in your own data center and David added all the info needed on this context. However, I just want to add little more as you are new to Windows Azure. I can understand why you are trying to do something like this and because I have had similar conversation with other partners in past, I believe this information is useful.

The main why you couldn't do it because Windows Azure main components i.e. Compute, Storage, Networking and other value added services which are built upon main component are just not available in your machine however, there is a lot more to it.

Windows Azure Appliance is a product which can be deployed to any Data Center and currently used by Dell, eBay, Fujitsu and HP as described in this link. Windows Azure and Windows Azure Appliance are not exactly same, however, Windows Azure Appliance does have a similar model of Compute, package deployment, Storage, Management portal and functionality. So when available to general public this could be a choice for data centers to have something similar to Azure running in their premise however it is currently available to only very limited partners.