Introduction
This topic explains what a cloud service is and discusses many of the main concepts of cloud services in Windows Azure.
How to guides
This topic explains how to use the Quick Create method to create a new cloud service and then use Upload to upload and deploy a cloud service package in Windows Azure.
You can configure the most commonly used settings for a cloud service in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Or, if you like to update your configuration files directly, download a service configuration file to update, and then upload the updated file and update the cloud service with the configuration changes. Either way, the configuration updates are pushed out to all role instances.
This how-to covers how to update a cloud service deployment, how to swap deployments to promote a deployment in staging to a deployment in production, how to link a resource to a cloud service, and how to delete a cloud service.
You can monitor key performance metrics for your cloud services in the Management Portal, and you can customize what you want to monitor to meet your needs.
You can scale your cloud service by adding or removing role instances. If you link a SQL Database to your cloud service, you can scale the database also.
You can use AppDynamics to monitor your cloud service and identify problems such as slow and stalled user requests and errors, and to troubleshoot and isolate the root cause of such problems.
Command-line management
Learn to manage Windows-based virtual machines from the command line with the Windows Azure cmdlets for Windows PowerShell.
This cmdlet Help reference gives you parameters and examples for each cmdlet so you can quickly understand how to use each Windows Azure cmdlet.