Azure Cloud Service - Scale Up Instance Size

This article is a part of a series of articles related to one of the Azure Compute options “Cloud Services”.

• Azure Cloud Service Introduction
  
• Azure Cloud Services - Create Hello World Cloud Service Using Visual Studio
  
• Azure Cloud Service Examine Files
  
• Azure Cloud Service – Add existing Web Application to Cloud Service
  
• Azure Cloud Service – Compute Emulator
  
• Azure Cloud Service - Create Package using Visual Studio
  
• Azure Cloud Service – Create a new Cloud Service using Azure Management Portal
  
• Azure Cloud Service – Deploy Cloud Service using Azure Management Portal
  
• Azure Cloud Service – Create Staging Slot using Azure Management Portal
  
• Azure Cloud Service – VIP Swap using Azure Management Portal
  
• Azure Cloud Service – Delete Slot using Azure Management Portal.
  
• Azure Cloud Service – Scale up Instance Size
  
• Azure Cloud Service – Scale Out Instances using Visual Studio
• Azure Cloud Service – Enable Remote Desktop using Visual Studio

In our previous articles, we learned how to create Azure Cloud Service and how to deploy the same to the Cloud. In this article, we will learn how to increase the Instance Size of Virtual Machines created in the Cloud Service.

Open the Cloud Service Project that you created in Azure HelloWorld Cloud Service.



As shown in the above screen, select the Web Role located in the roles folder and double click the same to open the following Role Properties window.



In the Configuration tab of the Web Role Properties, under the Instances section, we have VM sizes with the following options in VM Size dropdown.



For more information about the available options, please have a look here. By default, for the Web Role, an instance with the following is created.

• CPU Cores – 1 Core (Small Instance)
• RAM – 1792 (1.75 GB)

If this default configuration is not enough for the project requirement, we can increase the instance size by configuring the VM Size dropdown shown above. For this example, let’s change the size of the VM to Medium with the following configuration.

• CPU Cores – 2 Cores (Medium Instance)
• RAM – 3584 (3.5 GB)

As soon as you change the size in VM Size dropdown in the Configuration tab, the ServiceDefinition.scdef file gets all the changes automatically from Small to Medium. For more details about ServiceDefinition file, please refer Azure Cloud Services - Project File Details.



Let’s Create Package using Visual Studio and Deploy Cloud Service using Azure Management Portal.

Navigate to the Cloud Service and in the “Roles and Instances” section of the Essentials tab, you notice the size of FrontEnd.Web Web role, while the size of the Virtual Machine is Medium.



Note: It looks like (as of this writing) there is no way you can increase (Scale up) the VM Size from the Azure Management portal. However, you can scale-out from Azure Management Portal which we will discuss in the next article.

In this article, we have learned how to increase the size of the VM of a Cloud Service. Hope you enjoyed reading the article. Your feedback is appreciated.