A hosted service is the administrative and security boundary for an application deployed to Windows Azure. The hosted service specifies the service name, a label, and either the Windows Azure datacenter location or the affinity group into which the application is to be deployed. These cannot be changed once the hosted service is created. The service name is the subdomain under cloudapp.net used by the application, and the label is a human-readable name used to identify the hosted service on the Windows Azure Portal.
The Windows Azure Service Management REST API exposes a create hosted service operation. The REST endpoint for the create hosted service operation specifies the subscription ID under which the hosted service is to be created. The request requires a payload comprising an XML document containing the properties needed to define the hosted service, as well as various optional properties. The service name provided must be unique across...