What is the difference between an Azure Web Site and an Azure Web Role

Question

Can someone tell me the differences between the Azure Web Site and the Azure Web Roles for an ASP.NET MVC application? Can anyone justify using web role over website or vice versa

Is there anything which is difficult or impossible to do in a web role but possible in web site . For eg: if I've to put multiple websites in a single set of VMs using "websites" ? Ability to tune IIS? Ability to use the Cache service locally?

Answer 1

Web role over web apps:

• You can isolate a VM from the network
• IP restricted access to virtual machines can be provided
• It works with IIS
• Network isolation can be done
• You can easily split an app into different tiers and scale independently
   

Web apps over web role:

• It uses SQL or MySQL as a database
• Deployment can be done instantly with rollback history
• Website content backup support is provided
• Scaling is easy and fast
• Backup for website content.

Answer 2

Azure Web Role is like a virtual private host. You can try getting a VM that acts as your web server, and you own that VM instance.

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In simple terms, we can say that Azure Web Sites are like an elastic shared hosting service. You can deploy your app to a web server that is not controlled by you and which also servers other users' sites.

You can also scale your site up and down (at some extra charge) to make it more elastic as your resource needs a shift.