rolling upgrade
A rolling upgrade is a deployment feature of Windows Azure that allows service instances to be stopped and upgraded individually without bringing all of your instances down at the same time. This allows your sedrvice to remain operational during upgrade periods (albeit in a degraded state).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh472157.aspx
Updated: October 17, 2011
You can upgrade your Windows Azure hosted service to a new service version by using the Windows Azure Platform Management Portal or the Windows Azure Service Management API. Windows Azure provides two mechanisms for upgrading your deployed service:
- In-place upgrade. You can upgrade either a single role or all the roles within your service in place. You can perform an in-place upgrade when there are no changes to your service model between versions. Changes to the number of roles or the size of virtual machine that is used for a role also are supported, but require special handling. To avoid service interruptions during an in-place upgrade, Windows Azure stops some instances of your roles to upgrade them while keeping other instances running.
- Options for these roles (virtual machine size, whether native code execution is supported)
- Input endpoints for these roles.
- Local disk storage that the role will need.
- Configuration settings that the role will use.
- Number of role instances used by the role.
- Value for the settings defined in the Service definition file.
- Swap VIP upgrade. You can deploy a new version of your service to the staging environment, and then swap that deployment with the deployment currently in production. This type of upgrade is referred to as a VIP swap because the virtual IP address (VIP) of the service in the staging environment is swapped with the friendlier VIP address of the service in the production environment.
For more information about how Windows Azure processes both types of upgrade and a list of the types of service changes that each type of upgrade supports, see Overview of Updating a Windows Azure Service.