In a new post to his blog Maarten Balliauw shows a method that's a bit more lightweight than some of the other Windows Azure deployment methods you might have used in the past - creating a .cspkg from scratch to describe your project.

Those of you who are deploying PHP applications to Windows Azure, are probably using the Windows Azure tooling for Eclipse or the fantastic command-line tools available. I will give you a third option that allows for a 100% customized setup and is much more lightweight than the above options. Of course, if you want to have the out-of-the box functionality of those tools, stick with them.

He's broken it out into five steps to keep things clean and simple:

Creating a baseline package template (three XML-based definition files)
• Creating a script to auto-install the PHP runtime for you on deployment
• Creating a startup task or two to populate some environment variables for you
• Creating a packaging script to handle the actions you might need to do over and over for deployment
• Test the created package

You can download and test out this sample template by grabbing this archive.