Allow assigning and removing (and swapping!) reserved IP's on cloud services
It is unfortunate right now you cannot just assign or remove reserved ips on a cloud service (or use them with cloud services in Affinity Groups).
We have different cloud services for different environments and it would be great to be able to swap the reserved IP to the current production service. Technically it doesn't need to take the VIP from the cloud service it is swapping with rather just obtain a new (or use its old VIP) once the reserved IP is gone.
Right now reserved IP's are extremely immobile.

With recent announcements at the Ignite conference we now allow associating and disassociating reserved IPs on cloud services. Read update here: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-reserved-public-ip/
6 comments
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Kurt Relinger commented
Microsoft has made great strides here: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-reserved-public-ip/ While not seamless (it takes 1-2 minutes of downtime to do a Remove-AzureReservedIPAssociation followed by a Set-AzureReservedIPAssociation ) but finally reserved ips can move between cloud services. Hopefully mirosoft will add a Swap-AzureReservedIPAssociation or Move-AzureReservedIPAssociation to remove any downtime during the move in the future!
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Robin Art commented
Right now it is not possible to do a proper dev/staging/production clusters without relying on just TTL's and updating DNS to swap between them with virtual machines. This is not really an acceptable option for an enterprise cloud platform. The ability to cut traffic over to a new cloud service cluster is definitely a needed feature.
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MitchC commented
Amazon certainly seems to have a great setup for this, hopefully azure can work similarly: https://aws.amazon.com/articles/1346 you can assign a elastic ip from one instance directly to a new instance. The old instance will automatically get a new public ip once it loses the elastic ip.
This would be the exact desired behavior for azure.
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Mike Wolken commented
GCE also allows for changing what external static ips are assigned to: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances-and-network#staticnetworkaddress
its amazing that azure doesn't support this, I am not sure how one switches cloud services without proper ip route updates.
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Mark Ravion commented
Amazon EC2 has had the ability to assign ips like this and change the assignment on the fly for quite awhile. Azure is definitely lacking true production ready support for environments.
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Kevin commented
I couldn't believe that reserved IP's are so restricted. We were told by our azure rep to use Affinity groups however that has blocked the ability to use reserved IPs. In addition the ability to assign to different services once they are created is definitely needed.