The subject of this chapter is Azure Cloud Services. Azure Cloud Services is the oldest part of the Azure platform and it has been available since its first preview, announced at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008. Unlike a traditional VM with a hosted IIS, Azure Cloud Services is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offer from Azure. The successor of Azure Cloud Services is Azure App Service, which is covered in detail in Chapter 15, Implementing Azure App Services.

What does a service like Azure Cloud Services that has been on offer for so long look like? This question is precisely what I will pursue now and we will examine Azure Cloud Services in detail.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Azure Cloud Service
• Cloud service architecture
• Diving deeper into the Cloud Services
• Azure Cloud Services versus Azure App Services
• Creating your first Azure Cloud Service