Limit of Windows Azure Roles per Deployment Increased to 25

There are limits to Windows Azure, although less advertised than the platform’s scalability, and customers embracing Microsoft’s Cloud are undoubtedly aware of some of them, such as the maximum number of CPU cores across Hosted Service Projects, of storage accounts or of Hosted Service Projects. But with Windows Azure evolving constantly, the Cloud platform is also becoming less restrictive. Case in point: the number of roles allowed in Windows Azure deployments.

Windows Azure used to only allow 5 Windows Azure roles per deployment, but this is no longer the case, according to Corey Sanders, a principal program manager working on the Fabric Controller team on Windows Azure.

“Windows Azure has increased the maximum number of roles allowed in a deployment from 5 to 25. This change allows customers to deploy up to 25 distinct roles, which can be a mixture of Web Roles, Worker Roles, and Virtual Machine Roles, as part of a single deployment,” Sanders said.

“This increase gives application developers a more granular level of control over the lifecycle of different aspects of their deployment, since each of these 25 roles can be scaled and updated independently.”

In addition, the software giant has also overhauled communications for Windows Azure roles in hosted services. Essentially, the Redmond company now accounts for endpoints, differently than the way it did before expanding the limit of Windows Azure roles per deployment.

“Previously, a deployment was restricted to a maximum of 5 internal endpoints per role. Now, a deployment can have the total 25 internal endpoints allocated to roles in any combination (including all 25 on the same role),” Sanders added.

“This aligns with the way input endpoints can be allocated. Windows Azure now supports 25 internal endpoints and 25 input endpoints, allocated in 25 roles in any combination.”

Microsoft updated the “Overview of Enabling Communication for Role Instances” guidance offered on MSDN as of August 31st, 2011.

Customers leveraging Windows Azure need to have a look at the refreshed documentation, since it deals with the new limit of roles that they’ll be able to use per deployment.