I'm considering using a DNS solution to solve the issue with elastic IPs for Windows Azure roles. This blog post describes how to have both example.com and www.example.com point to an azure role such as example.cloudapp.net. However, I would like to streamline the process so that there is no forwarding.
One solution I've found is DNS Azure and another that seems to fulfill the requirements is Amazon Route 53. I was wondering whether anyone has had experience with either one of those for this particular task.
As long as you always have something deployed in Azure then your IP address will not change. We use A records on our DNS configuration to point to our IP address because it hasn't changed in the past few months.
New deploys either replace the existing deploy (thereby keeping the same virtual machines) or get deployed using a VIP swap (which keeps the same IP address).
If you want to you could also use CNAMES rather than A records. This takes care of keeping it up to date.
DNSMadeeasy works with azure. they have created something called ANAME records.
This is how we do it.. 1. Create an ANAME record for azure.oursite.com pointing to oursite.cloudapp.net (This aname record will automatically pull the ip from oursite.cloudapp.net and create the a record automatically. No api, no work. 2. We create a bunch of cnames that point to our azure deployment. www > azure.oursite.com . These CNAMES can also be created on different domains so google.com could create a cname frank.google.com > azure.oursite.com 3. This takes care of email servers.
If you have multiple could deployments then you can create azure1.oursite.com and azure2.oursite.com and so on.
The only thing that sucks so far is that we cannot use their failover feature with Aname records. They say they are working on that.
You could also create reserved IPs for you cloud services:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-reserved-public-ip/