Windows Services in Windows azure

You might find the worker role is a better fit for running a process every hour. If you have the code for the WIndows Service it should not be hard to impleemnt it in a worker role.\n\nYou will, however, have to use a 3rd party service to send the email, as this is not supported in Azure.\n\nRegards,\n\nAlan",

Yes, you can do this*. In order to install a Windows Service in a PaaS worker role (or web role), you will need to create a startup script that installs the service on boot (and checks to see if already installed on subsequent boots).\n\nIf you are using IaaS VMs, then the installation is straightforward - just do as you do today.\n\n*Windows Azure Websites is a shared model, so installing services is not supported there.",

To combine both Alan Smith's and dunnry's answers, both are correct - \n\nYou can install a windows services on a PaaS role using a startup script (other than web sites).\nIf you're using a Virtual Machine you just install the service on the VM\n\nBut Alan is completely correct that the best route forward in most cases is migrating the code to a worker role which is usually quite straight forward, would work best and would be easier to maintain.\n\nHaving said all of that - sending emails from within Azure is not necessarily a good idea as many mail servers black list the ips (turns out Azure is a great platform for spammers)",

I want to make an extra addition to Alan and Yossi's answers. It's important to know the why, because simply installing the Windows Service shouldn't be a problem. \n\nBut if you do this you'll be missing out on something very important. If you run all of your code in the actual Worker Role process you'll get the monitoring for free. This means, if your process crashes for whatever reason, Windows Azure will restart the instance to make sure the process gets back online.\n\nNow if you simply go and install a Windows Service through a startup script you won't be able to take advantage from this automated monitoring. You'll need to make sure you have some kind of recovery (this could be a setting on the Windows Service or a different process). But it's simply too much work for something you could get for free.",