Performing ALM in a Windows Azure environment adds additional needs to our ALM approach. While the core is still Team Foundation Server combined with Visual Studio, new aspects arise. Before describing the specifics of ALM on Windows Azure, a list of the characteristics of the Windows Azure platform is shown as follows:
Cloud services (application level) allow deploying to two identical but independent environments; the staging and the production environment. The word "Production" implies that it's a more mature and better environment than "Staging", but this is not the case. The staging slot is very useful as a test bed for Geotopia services before going live in a production slot. Going live is just a click away by swapping the virtual IPs of both the environments. Therefore, we can go live without having to perform a possibly cumbersome deployment directly into production, but rather have it tested in the staging environment first. Use...