Azure Web Sites Deployment: how does it work?

Azure Web Sites supports continuous deployment from source code control and repository tools like BitBucket, CodePlex, Dropbox, Git, GitHub, Mercurial, and TFS/VSO. You can use these tools to maintain the content and code for your web site, and then quickly and easily push changes to your site when you want.

Supported Deployment types

Pushing local files to Azure by using Local Git allows you to manually push updates from a local project to your Azure Web Site, while deploying from BitBucket, CodePlex, Dropbox, GitHub, or Mercurial results in a continuous deployment process where Azure will pull in the most recent updates from your project.

While both methods result in your project being deployed to an Azure Web Site, continuous deployment is useful when you have multiple people working on a project and want to ensure that the latest version is always published regardless of who made the most recent update. Continuous deployment is also useful if you are using one of the above mentioned tools as the central repository for your application.

On the net there are plenty of articles explaining how to deploy an Azure WebSite (i.e. http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-deploy/) or how to implement Continuous Deployment strategies (i. e. http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-publish-source-control/).

But how does it work behind the scenes?

Well, the answer is "Kudu".

Kudu is the engine behind deployments in Azure Web Sites, but it can also run outside of Azure.

It has a somewhat unusual architecture, in the sense that it is a single-tenant rather than multi-tenant service. What this means is that each Azure Web Site has its own instance of the Kudu service, completely distinct from the Kudu service sites used for other Azure sites.

It stays active in background and "watches" for checkins, commits, new files, completed builds and so on. When it detects something, KuduSync starts and do the "dirty work".

It's a great tool, because:

• it’s an open source project available on GitHub (https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu)
• it's automatically installed on all Windows Azure Web Sites
• it can use a custom deployment script

But the most important thing (imho) is this:

The deployment is created in your website’s folder structure and the new deployment is copied to your site’s root, leaving old deployments intact.

This means you can "rollback" to any deploy you've done in the past. This, for me, it's a killer feature!

It's also possible to have access to the Kudu web dashboard, using an url like "https://your_website_name.scm.azurewebsites.net/" and your deployment credentials or your Azure service admin credentials.

Kudu Dashboard

In the Kudu dashboard you can find a lot of useful informations about your website's environment together with a set of tools to manage your website and, last but not least, a complete set of REST APIs. There is also the possibility to manage WebSites extensions.

There is also a great video where David Ebbo and Scott Guthrie explain how Kudu works: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Azure-Friday/What-is-Kudu-Azure-Web-Sites-Deployment-with-David-Ebbo