title: Is it a good idea to reuse an Azure web role for backend processing?
body: <p>I'm porting a huge application to Windows Azure. It will have a web service frontend and a processing backend. So far I thought I would use web roles for servicing client requests and worker roles for backend processing.</p>
  
  <p>Managing two kinds of roles seems problematic - I'll need to decide how to scale two kinds of roles and also I'll need several (at least two) instances of each to ensure reasonable fault tolerance and this will slightly increase operational costs. Also in my application client requests are rather lightweight and backend processing is heavyweight, so I'd expect that backend processing would consume far more processing power than servicing client requests.</p>
  
  <p>This is why I'm thinking of using web roles for everything - just spawn threads and do both servicing requests and backend processing in each instance. This will make the role more complicated but will I guess simplify management. I'll have more instances of a uniform role and better fault tolerance.</p>
  
  <p>Is it a good idea to reuse web roles for backend processing? What drawbacks should I expect?</p>