When deploying or restarting a worker role instance in a cloud service, if there is a problem in the startup code - the role instance seems to go through roughly 4 hours of restart attempts before finally timing out and giving up. I'm not sure if this is dependent on the type of failure occurring, but it's surely not a sensible timeout... 4 hours - the issue is that the cloud service is blocked for this period, it doesn't seem possible to do anything else such as abort the startup etc.
This has just cost me a day, in my case the worker role was setting up an OWIN self hosted service that depended on an identity server which was unreachable - code running within the OnStart event was failing and I was stuck for hours. I tried pretty much everything from azure portal.
Questions - can we set the timeout? can we abort an instance startup? (perhaps some stuff that can be done via the CLI that isn't available via the portal?)
thanks
