One of the other useful Web Site features that we are introducing today is a feature we call “Always On”. When Always On is enabled on a site, Windows Azure will automatically ping your Web Site regularly to ensure that the Web Site is always active and in a warm/running state. This is useful to ensure that a site is always responsive (and that the app domain or worker process has not paged out due to lack of external HTTP requests).
It also useful as a way to keep a Web Site active for scenarios where you want to run background code within it irrespective of whether it is actively processing external HTTP customer requests. We have another new feature we are enabling this week called “Web Jobs” that makes it really easy to now write this background code and run it within a Web Site. I’ll blog more about this feature and how to use it in the next few days.
Great news (from Scott Guthrie's blog). Until now, my typical approach has been to use Quartz.Net to have background jobs, and use a service to ping the web site continuously, using for example SetCronJob. From now on, Web Sites have built-in support for Always On, and very soon will have Web Jobs. Well done Azure.