The battle rages on with Microsoft Azure. Having come from a solid year of working with Amazon’s EC2, I find working with Azure to be very frustrating at times.

A recent example is how the IP addresses – both public and private – change on instances.

For example, I have a cloud service that is up and running with a production instance and a staging instance. The private IP addresses end with .11 and .12.

I deploy my project to the staging instance and then swap staging and production once I have verified that staging is good.

What is the state of things now?

Now I have private IP addresses that end in .10 and .12. The address that ended in .11 is gone and now I have an IP with the .10 address that is not allowed to communicate with other machines since it is unrecognized.

I remember going through similar pains with EC2 (getting machines to communicate internally), but at least EC2 kept things consistent. The IPs would stick on a box that wasn’t stop and restarted. If I just rebooted a machine, the IP address would stay the same and I didn’t have this tight deployment integration that does “magic” for me.