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I'm experiencing some issues with a website I am working on, for a company called BlueSEQ. We recently switched to Windows Azure to get more scalability and performance, but we are having issues regarding the domains.

We would like blueseq.com to be the main domain instead of the current blueseqservice.cloudapp.net. Is that possible? I tried making an "A" record pointing to the "VIP" of the Windows Azure service, but whenever I republish the project to Azure, I get a new IP.

Any suggestions?

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  • Yes you can use A records now, as the IP is now retained across republishing. See my answer below for details.
    – iCollect.it Ltd
    Commented Jan 5, 2012 at 18:35

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You need to create a cname record on your DNS host and forward it to blueseqservice.cloudapp.net. A cname behaves like an A record but rather than forwarding to an ip, it targets a fqdn.

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    Note that for frustrating technical reasons you probably can't create a cname at blueseq.com. Instead you'll need to use www.blueseq.com . This sucks if you're going naked with your domains, but is a big limitation of cloud systems that use DNS load balancing.
    – jcrawfordor
    Commented Aug 22, 2011 at 4:38
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Apparently you can - Azure now supports A Records as it provides fixed IP addresses:

With an A record, you map a domain (e.g. contoso.com or www.contoso.com) or a wildcard domain (e.g. *.contoso.com) to the IP address of a deployment within a Windows Azure hosted service. Accordingly, the lifetime of this IP address is the lifetime of a deployment within your hosted service.

The IP address gets created the first time you deploy to an empty slot (either production or staging) in the hosted service and is retained by the slot until you delete the deployment from that slot.

See this link for more information - Section: Expose Your Application on a Custom Domain

Just tested it with one of my own domains and a sample Azure app in staging. - Works a treat!

I found when you use the Swap VIP option, to move from staging to production, your staging IP address gets taken with you. This meant I retained the staging website pointed at by my A record after republishing and after swapping to Production. The downside to this is that your domain points at staging or at production when you swap, which is probably not what you wanted as your domain would likely only point at production. A CNAME record will do that, but does not allow for a blank subdomain.

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Azure websites and Azure web services now offer A record support for domains as default. They didn't at the time of writing the original question.

That's a good thing!

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