consistency of External IP Addresses (Public virtual IP of Cloud service)

Hi,

     Regarding ,  consistency of External IP Addresses , Is there any feature in azure like amazon's elastic IP address ?. Where in amazon user can request for elastic ip address for each vm that remains constant across Vm's Shutdown operation.

      I need to have one static public IP for the cloud service that remains constant even when there are no Virtual machines present in that cloud service.

Any help is greatly appreciated in this regard. thanks in advance.

Thanks,

-Rakesh