Deployment Schedule Concerns on Cloud

Recently, I have learned a lesson when deploying applications on Windows Azure. It is common that we usually make a deployment schedule for our applications to meet a certain launch date (or time) i.e. something like deploy between 7:00 to 9:00 am or 12:00 to 2:00am. Based on my recent experience, we should make the deployment schedule a few days earlier if possible.

This is because the provisioning of instances on Windows Azure can sometimes take a very long time. Provisioning 3 roles in the Southeast Asia region can take up to 90 minutes and provisioning a new Service Bus can take up to 30 minutes sometimes (15 minutes for the DNS to refresh). If you made any mistakes and need to delete and recreate the services, it even takes more time.

Therefore, a recommended practice would be to allocate more time for deployment when deploying apps to the Cloud. It is no longer just copy some dlls over to a folder or "just double-click the setup.exe".