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How to Deploy a Service Upgrade to Production by Swapping VIPs in Windows Azure

Updated: November 22, 2010

You can upgrade your service by deploying a new package to the staging environment and then swapping the staging and production deployments. This type of upgrade is called a Virtual IP or VIP swap, as it swaps the addresses of the two deployments. Both deployments remain online during the swap process. You can swap VIPs using the Windows Azure Platform Management Portal, or by using the Service Management API.

If you are upgrading your service with a new service definition file, you must swap VIPs; you cannot perform an in-place upgrade. However, you can swap VIPs only if the number of endpoints specified by the service definition is identical for both deployments. For example, if you add an HTTPS endpoint to a web role that previously exposed only an HTTP endpoint, you cannot upgrade your service using a VIP swap; you'll need to delete your production deployment and redeploy instead.

Assuming that the service you wish to upgrade is running in production, you must first upload the new version of your service to the staging environment.

  1. Log into the Management Portal.

  2. In the navigation pane, click Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN.

  3. In the upper portion of the navigation pane, click Hosted Services.

  4. In the services and deployments window, expand the subscription that contains the hosted service to upgrade and then click the deployment to upgrade.

  5. On the ribbon, click Swap VIP. This will open the Swap VIPs dialog.

  6. Click OK.

VIP Swap in Portal

To initiate a VIP swap using the Service Management API, call the Swap Deployment operation.

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How do you swap a production deployment to staging?
In a single deployment, single instance environment where the deployment is in production, how do you swap it back to staging? The portal won't allow me to do anything but stop/start or delete.

[AzureDocGuy] - Once a deployment is in production, there is no provision to move it to staging. You can deploy a new service to staging and swap the VIPs, or you can stop and delete the service.  I will update the documentation to add these points of information.
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