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Windows Azure and Fixed IP Addresses

 

Several folk that I work with have asked about the ability to reserve a fixed IP address for their Windows Azure services.

This is often needed in order to provide access on a whitelisting service, proxy or firewall.
Windows Azure does not offer this functionality. A virtual IP address is determined for you at deployment time and will remain fixed from that point on until the deployment is actually deleted. For further details see this blog post by Corey Sanders.

But what about when I delete my deployment to upgrade my service?
In the past a change to the Service Definition (increasing or decreasing the size of a VM, Changing role endpoints, Adding or removing roles etc.) would require a full re-deployment. Because IP Addresses are allocated at deployment time, deleting the deployment would reallocate your previous address to the pool and the re-deployment would likely result in a new IP Address.

As of Oct 2011 this is no longer the case!

Most of these updates can now be performed on a running deployment, without having to delete and redeploy.
See this blog post by Drew McDaniel for more details.
The MSDN documentation has been updated to reflect these changes.

Note: These update types are only available with SDK v1.5 and beyond.

So... whilst we don’t give you the ability to reserve an IP address, with the new in-place and VIP-swap update capabilities, nearly every software update scenario may be performed without a delete+redeploy, resulting in a stable IP address for the vast majority of applications in Windows Azure.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 26, 2012
    This is a problem. Some services, like replicating database, require that the hosts have static, immutable IP address. I just upgraded two servers, and after that I got two new IP addresses, and I was forced to reconfigure all the replication parameters, a task that could be saved if you fix this problem.

  • Anonymous
    December 30, 2012
    All of my applications are .Net/SQL server based and it's sad that I'm forced to host my apps with AWS.  

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2013
    So we do an in-place upgrade without a VIP swap, and when for some reason the upgrade fails, how do we roll back without the VIP swap?

  • Anonymous
    September 14, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 18, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 13, 2014
    No more grief :) 5 free static IP per subscription msdn.microsoft.com/.../dn690120.aspx