I was surprised by a few questions on the 532 and 533 exam that more or less wanted to me to recall exactly what settings were in which configuration files for Cloud Services.  I think at the basic level this is a pretty tough thing to discern without documentation in front of me.

For example:  Scaling the instance count for a given Role is defined in the .csdef file, but the instance size for a Role is in .cscfg.  It's not obvious to me why one versus the other is appropriate.

Anyone have any useful tips for remembering/recalling what goes where?

Thanks!

-Ben

• Edited by Benjamin Finkel 17 hours 50 minutes ago

Hi Benjamin,

This is a good question actually. The way I look at this is that in the .csdef you define the structure of your service including things that are 'more or less fixed' (that's why you need to redeploy updates on it). Often the VM size can be regarded as an  software architect/developer decision, the amount of instances is in those cases more of an ITOps/Devops decision as it applies to scaling at runtime. In cloud services the primary option for scaling is scaling out not up (more instances instead of bigger ones).

What also plays a role is how Azure works internally, adding instances is easier than scaling up the memory, CPU and disks of an instance.

Btw. the specifications show that the VMSize is in de .csdef NOT in the .csconf, but I assume you swapped them to test us, right? ;-)