I published my Cloud Service from visual studio with the advanced setting Incremental Update selected. My understanding was that this would allow my service to keep the previous assigned IP address. However, after my publish my service had a new IP Address assigned to it.
Does anyone know why or what other factors may be involved? I don't think this should matter and I don't know why I got this error. While the package uploaded fine the overall deployment ended with the following message.
The deployment has timed out while waiting on the role to reach the ready status.
I don't know that this should be a factor in the assigned IP Address though.
Any time Azure deploys a Cloud Service and provisions a new VM it can and most often will assign a new VIP (Virtual IP Address) to the Cloud Service. If you want/need the VIP to stay the same always then you will need to setup a Reserved IP for use with your Cloud Service.