Windows Azure Local Testing

Question

I am recently evaluating Windows Azure. One of the problems I found is that Azure start charging as soon as the app is deployed even if it is in the testing stage.

I want to ask existing Azures how much of your tests are done locally and how much are done after it is deployed? Does Azure provide any means of testing web services locally?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, Azure provides an emulation framework that largely (but not completely) mimics the Azure deployment environment. This is usually sufficient for testing.

Costs of test deployments can be controlled somewhat, however:

• It's possible to deploy "extra-small" instances that are significantly less expensive than larger instances, at the expense of throughput - which unless you're doing load testing isn't usually an issue

• You won't generally need to have multiple instances of a role deployed, just one will usually do, unless you have major concurrency issues under load

• Some of the cost of Azure is in data traffic, which will obviously be less expensive for test instances

• It's not necessary to have test instances permanently available. They can be torn down or re-deployed at will; if your environment becomes sophisticated this can be done programmatically by a continuous integration engine.

In practice we're finding that the cost of test instances is relatively insignificant compared to the cost of our developers and the alternative, which would be to provision and maintain our own data centre.

In particular, being able to quickly spin up a test environment that is a direct mimic of production in a few minutes is a very powerful feature.