I have a standard azure webrole that requires some 3rd party software to be installed on the cloud service. The webrole itself is very basic. The 3rd party software has a few prerequisites, so everything is being included in the role's content (a total of 5 MSI files) and is installed via a an elevated startup task.
The software is installing successfully and everything's working, but including these MSIs as content for the webrole results in an 80MB *.cspkg file.
Excluding the installers yields a package size of 10MB. The total size of all the 5 MSI files is 20.5MB. I don't understand why including 20MB of installers results in an 80MB cloud service package.
I think the packaging process might be attempting to compress the files (unintentionally increasing the payload). Is what I'm seeing normal? Or is there any way of reducing the resulting package when installers are included?
The package for WebRoles is usually bigger then one for worker roles because your role content is included twice! Once is approot folder and once in sites\0\ folder.
As a second thought of yours - compressing. This is true. Azure package is just a regular zip file. You can safely rename yourpackage.cspkg to yourpackage.zip and browse the content.
However your strategy for keeping installation files in package is not effective in its roots. What I will suggest is that you put your 3rd party installer in a blob storage. Then first download it and then install it. For downloading the content you can use various techniques. From PowerShell to Azure Bootstrapper and probably many more.
Having your (all and any of them) 3rd party installers in a Blob storage is a recommended best practice for designing applications for Windows Azure.
As to the question why your Web Application is copied twice in the Azure Deployment package - it has its roots in the times where Windows Azure Web Role was using IIS Hostable Web Core and not full IIS. And is probably still there for backward compatibility.