Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS) enables you to build highly scalable websites on Windows Azure. Here is an overview of the benefits of WAWS:
- Efficient resource utilization: As your customer base grows, the usage of your application increases as well. You can proactively scale your websites based on the traffic patterns to your website
- Usage based costing: Cost plays a key role in selecting the Cloud based strategyfor your needs. Azure websites has usage based model (Pay-as-you-Grow) and 6 or 12 month plans to choose from. To learn more , see Windows Azure Websites Pricing
- Faster time to market: You can focus on the application and not the infrastructure. This opens up more time to unleash the creativity and productivity of the developers in turn reducing the time to market for your application
Best Practices
These practices will help you make optimal use of the infrastructure offered Windows Azure websites and provide a high performing, reliable website for your end-users.- Build a scalable architecture
- Bottlenecks in the architecture can cause higher latency. You should identify all major bottlenecks in your current architecture which can be caused by various reasons for example bad application design, bandwidth restrictions. Refactor your application architecture to avoid them.
- Load test your website using different scale configurations (combination of Instance size and number of instances) to understand the right scale configuration under regular load. Various tools like Visual Studio, Apache Jmeter can be used to perform load tests.
- Use Web Analytic tools like Google Analytics or WebTrends to identify the traffic patterns and the average requests per second for your website.
- Setup auto-scaling to manage unexpected traffic peaks.See How to scale websites to learn more
- If your application uses a database tier, integrate a distributed caching solution such as Azure Cache service to improve performance

- Design the architecture to be resilient to failures
- Have an automated backup-and-restore strategy for your content by building your own tools with Windows Azure SDK or using third-party services like Cloud Cellar
- Setup redundant copies of your website on at least 2 datacenters and Load balance incoming traffic between these datacenters.
- Setup automatic failover capabilities when a service goes down in a datacenter using a Global traffic manager
- Setup Content delivery network (CDN) service along with your website to boost performance by caching content and provide a high availability of your website
- Remove dependency of any tightly coupled components/services you use with your WAWS website if possible.
- Design a risk-mitigation strategy before moving to the cloud to mitigate unexpected outages
- Create a staged environment and simulate failure scenarios by stopping your sites to evaluate how your website performs under failure
- Automate Infrastructure
- Deployments to the website :
- Test inproduction using Staged sites :
- Enable diagnostic logging:
- Site diagnostics: It allows you to enable detailed error logging, failed request Tracing and web server logging.
- Application diagnostics: It allows you to capture information produced by a web application.
- Enable monitoring:
- Security