DevOps is about increasing efficiency and eliminating barriers. Learn how to manually connect Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to Microsoft Azure.

Originally published in 2012, this was my first published article, a guest post for MSDN covering some of the tricks we found for optimizing and improving the performance of PHP with classic Web and Worker Roles on Azure. With the original post having since been removed from MSDN, the contents are now posted here for anyone interested in understanding this older Azure technology.