When we publish a cloud service to Azure through Visual Studio, we're creating a cloud service package (.cspkg) with an accompanying cloud service config (.cscfg—the same as in our solution) that is automatically deployed to Azure for us. We can create packages manually in Visual Studio or on a build server in a similar way to websites. This allows us to publish cloud services outside of Visual Studio from the portal or by using PowerShell.
As with manually publishing websites, it's not the best idea to publish cloud services built on a developer machine for the same reasons, but it can be a useful way of testing if our packages work as expected with the correct cloud configuration and application configuration transforms. We'll manually create a cloud package from Visual Studio in the following procedure:
Right-click on the cloud service project (not the role project) and select Package.
Select values...