Migration to SDK 2.1, from HWC to IIS

Question

Hello,
I have an azure webrole running on SDK 1.8, it has a handful WCF services and a common data access component to access an Azure SQL database and Azure Storage. It was running using the Hosted Web Core (HWC) - no Site definitions as I do not host websites
on it - so far this worked really fine for the last two years.
Now I wanted to update it to SDK 2.1 (which should be latest for VS2010) and I am facing several issues:
I learned that hosting the WCF services via HWC is no longer possible since SDK 2.0 and I have to use IIS.
This leads to the problem that the webrole is running under a different process as the webservices.
So far I have created a common component that is initialized when the webrole was started. It read the configuration, which contained the parameters to access the SQL database and the storage. This component was used by the webservices to read/write data
to database and storage.
Now with IIS, the initialization only happens for the process of the webrole. This leaves the webservices with a non-initialized data access component.
To the questions:
1: What would be the best practice to access a SQL database and the storage from the webservices. These have been completely stateless so far, but now they each would need to read the access parameters for the database and storage.
I am lacking a defined entry point there to initialized the component.
2: Why was HWC hosting removed? For my scenario (Webservices with database/storage backend) I see no benefits of using IIS (just a lot of issues for migrating and redesigning the architecture).
Any advice would be helpful, also an explanation why HWC was removed (so I can understand it).

Answer 1

Hello Will, thanks for the answer,
Yes, I am using an Azure hosted SQL database. I would like to retain having the sql server connection parameters in the webrole configuration instead of the web.config. That way I can react to the role configuration changes and don't need to recycle the
role when switching databases. Same when storage settings change.
I have found the article you posted about IIS and changes from HWC as well, but I found no explanation why the possibility hosting a webservice HWC style was removed.
Did it cause problems or issues or was it a strategic change to only go the IIS way? So far I did not have many issues hosting webservices without IIS (in contrast to experiences with IIS, which did not always go smoothly).
I am now rewriting the data access component to initialize itself lazy-loading style on the 1st access (even if I am no big fan of that pattern, I usually prefer to have a well-defined initialization at startup).
Anyway, I know I can't go back because sooner or later the older SDK versions will become unsupported. Learning why HWC was removed would help to understand things better.
Maybe this post helps others to identify migration issues early without a lot of searching.
Thanks for the help.