I'm just curious if the current version of Umbraco (4.9) or the upcoming version (4.10) support Azure well?
For example, can somebody edit content in Umbraco when the site is running on multiple Azure instances?
If content is published on one Azure instance, will all other instances reflect that change (the reason I ask this is because I know there is an XML cache file and I'm not sure that gets updated on other computers in an Azure load balanced scenario)?
Can it run off of SQL Azure?
Are there any pitfalls I should know about when considering moving a major Umbraco site from local IIS servers to Azure?
Note that we plan to disable editing of templates in Umbraco (we want them to be edited by developers, and then deployed to Azure), so that will not be an issue. Also, we don't manage any media in the Media section of Umbraco, so that is also not an issue.
Finally, are there any special install instructions (hopefully up to date) for installing Umbraco on Azure?
Currently Umbraco 4.9 runs very well on a single instance in Azure. It does support SQL Azure but you will need to convert your database using SQLAzureMW.
If you need to run on multiple instances currently you have to use the Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco, this project was created by Microsoft however when Azure websites launched with Umbraco (single instance) support they deprecated the project. One of the things the accelerator does is to disable the XML cache. The accelerator project does work very well considering it was a retrofit. You can watch a video here about one of the most advanced implementations of it.
The work currently being carried out by Umbraco HQ on developing the Concorde project will hopefully deliver native multi Azure instance support, but there is currently no public ETA for this.
With regard with install instructions, if you use the acccelerator there are very good instructions packaged with the accererlator. For a native single instance I beleive the easiest way to do this is to install in Azure Websites from the gallery, but I haven't tried this myself, I'm sure this can also be performed manually.
Very interesting, Jeavon. I'm hoping Umbraco will provide first class Azure support sooner rather than later, but it looks like it may be workable to use it on Azure already.
I don't think I will need to use the SQL conversion tool you mentioned, as long as I start by installing Umbraco straight to SQL Azure.
And I was confused about why Azure Web Sites would be considered a substitute for the accelerator, until I read this: "Windows Azure Web Sites provides a highly scalable, stateful hosting environment that supports rapid deployment" (via http://blog.ntotten.com/2012/06/21/update-on-the-windows-azure-accelerators/ ). I assume by "stateful", they mean that session will be maintained, and I assume by "highly scalable" they mean that the statefulness will be maintained even when using multiple instances. Not sure how they do that... maybe they copy session between servers, or maybe they have sticky sessions (i.e., once a user visits a server, they stick to that server). This is something I will have to look into, but it looks promising.
As far as the cache file, I'll have to see how Umbraco performs when I disable the cache by setting XmlCacheEnabled to false. If it's too slow, maybe I can set ContinouslyUpdateXmlDiskCache to true, and have each instance periodically (e.g., every 5 minutes) force a cache update by publishing some placeholder content. Or maybe there is an API call I can use force the cache to be refreshed. Or maybe I'll get lucky and Umbraco will be smart enough to update the cache across all instances for me (I know there is a setting that facilitates this in a load balanced environment, but I'm not sure that will work in a cloud environment).
Looks like I'll have to do some testing to see how viable Umbraco 4.10 is in Azure when using multiple instances. Maybe the video you linked to will answer some of my questions, but I'll have to wait until I get home to watch it (my work network is sloooooooowwww).
Any news about running Umbraco on azure with multiple instance? Do you have some feedback since I'm starting a project on which I will need azure hosting and multi-instance. Could you take some of your time to give me some feedback?
I haven't tried it yet, but I do have an idea of how it might be done in a worst case scenario. Say you have www.site.com, and you are running it in Umbraco on Azure using multiple instances. I am guessing the front end website would run just fine, but I'm not sure if www.site.com/umbraco/umbraco.aspx (the back end) would work (I'm also not sure it would fail). To get around that, one could create umbraco.site.com and have it run the same content that is running on www.site.com, but make it single instance. You'd do any Umbraco interaction through umbraco.site.com/umbraco/umbraco.aspx, but the public site would be served up by www.site.com.
Now, anytime you published from umbraco.site.com, the Umbraco instances on www.site.com wouldn't know about the publish, so you'd have to let them know somehow (I dealt with that a bit in my above post). One idea would be to contact each of the instances directly (using the Azure API, assuming this is possible) and call an Umbraco API function to force the caches to update each time a publish is made on umbraco.site.com. Or a job could be created to periodically (say, once a minute) force a cache refresh on each server. Or maybe the cache could be disabled.
I've not tried that, but I don't see why it couldn't work. Let me know if you have any questions. And one final note. Umbraco 6 is out... checking out if that supports Azure would be worthwhile. I did notice that during the install process it gives "SQL Azure" as one of the database options, so that's promising.
There is no new support for Azure multiple instances in v6 unless you use the Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco. However it appears that there might be some progress on this front as on Tuesday 12th Feb a ServerRegistrationService was added to the 6.1.0 source. This is a very important service which will dramatically improve the ability to automate load balancing and also faciliate multiple instance native cloud deployments.
We are looking at rebuilding our existing site using Umbraco 7 as the CMS and deploying to Azure.
We have looked at the following -
1. Deploying to a Cloud service, 2 web roles 2 worker roles + use of theWindows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco - As this is a deprecated solution there is some hesitation going down this route.
2. Deploying to a Website across multiple instances, with the possibility to create 2 worker roles that communicate with the website.
Both solutions will be built with scaling out in mind as traffic spikes.
Has there been any change in Umbraco that will allow it to be deployed to an Azure cloud service (multiple web roles) without having to use the Accelerator?
Does anyone know if we will have issues if we deploy Umbraco 7 as an Azure website across multiple instance, will we hit some of the same issues as deploying to multiple web roles?
Not a lot of progress in this area as yet. Darren Ferguson gave a great session at the recent Umbraco UK Festival about the three flavours of Umbraco on Azure and I believe the videos will be online in the coming weeks.
Fundamentally if you want to use WebRoles for the scalability then you still need to use the Accelerator (Darren has a fork which has some improvements). You can use Azure VMs with Umbraco and without needing the accelerator and you can still load balance them by using DFS, again Darren is the expert for this setup. Alternatively there is Azure Web Sites but there is a challenge with communication between instances (Darren has a hack around this issue) and there is a limit of 10 instances.
Next year we will also have Umbraco as a service to consider also but I'm not sure if it is launching with multi instance support or if that will come later.
I don't think anyone has tried Umbraco v7 yet, but I think it is the same as v6 under the hood, so should be ok but no guarantee.
"Alternatively there is Azure Web Sites but there is a challenge with communication between instances (Darren has a hack around this issue) and there is a limit of 10 instances."
Are there details available anywhere of this hack ?
Does Umbraco 4.9 (or 4.10) Support Azure Well?
I'm just curious if the current version of Umbraco (4.9) or the upcoming version (4.10) support Azure well?
For example, can somebody edit content in Umbraco when the site is running on multiple Azure instances?
If content is published on one Azure instance, will all other instances reflect that change (the reason I ask this is because I know there is an XML cache file and I'm not sure that gets updated on other computers in an Azure load balanced scenario)?
Can it run off of SQL Azure?
Are there any pitfalls I should know about when considering moving a major Umbraco site from local IIS servers to Azure?
Note that we plan to disable editing of templates in Umbraco (we want them to be edited by developers, and then deployed to Azure), so that will not be an issue. Also, we don't manage any media in the Media section of Umbraco, so that is also not an issue.
Finally, are there any special install instructions (hopefully up to date) for installing Umbraco on Azure?
Hi Nicholas,
Currently Umbraco 4.9 runs very well on a single instance in Azure. It does support SQL Azure but you will need to convert your database using SQLAzureMW.
If you need to run on multiple instances currently you have to use the Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco, this project was created by Microsoft however when Azure websites launched with Umbraco (single instance) support they deprecated the project. One of the things the accelerator does is to disable the XML cache. The accelerator project does work very well considering it was a retrofit. You can watch a video here about one of the most advanced implementations of it.
The work currently being carried out by Umbraco HQ on developing the Concorde project will hopefully deliver native multi Azure instance support, but there is currently no public ETA for this.
With regard with install instructions, if you use the acccelerator there are very good instructions packaged with the accererlator. For a native single instance I beleive the easiest way to do this is to install in Azure Websites from the gallery, but I haven't tried this myself, I'm sure this can also be performed manually.
Hope that's helpful.
Regards,
Jeavon
Very interesting, Jeavon. I'm hoping Umbraco will provide first class Azure support sooner rather than later, but it looks like it may be workable to use it on Azure already.
I don't think I will need to use the SQL conversion tool you mentioned, as long as I start by installing Umbraco straight to SQL Azure.
And I was confused about why Azure Web Sites would be considered a substitute for the accelerator, until I read this: "Windows Azure Web Sites provides a highly scalable, stateful hosting environment that supports rapid deployment" (via http://blog.ntotten.com/2012/06/21/update-on-the-windows-azure-accelerators/ ). I assume by "stateful", they mean that session will be maintained, and I assume by "highly scalable" they mean that the statefulness will be maintained even when using multiple instances. Not sure how they do that... maybe they copy session between servers, or maybe they have sticky sessions (i.e., once a user visits a server, they stick to that server). This is something I will have to look into, but it looks promising.
As far as the cache file, I'll have to see how Umbraco performs when I disable the cache by setting XmlCacheEnabled to false. If it's too slow, maybe I can set ContinouslyUpdateXmlDiskCache to true, and have each instance periodically (e.g., every 5 minutes) force a cache update by publishing some placeholder content. Or maybe there is an API call I can use force the cache to be refreshed. Or maybe I'll get lucky and Umbraco will be smart enough to update the cache across all instances for me (I know there is a setting that facilitates this in a load balanced environment, but I'm not sure that will work in a cloud environment).
Looks like I'll have to do some testing to see how viable Umbraco 4.10 is in Azure when using multiple instances. Maybe the video you linked to will answer some of my questions, but I'll have to wait until I get home to watch it (my work network is sloooooooowwww).
Thanks again, Jeavon.
For anybody else reading this thread, you can read about the XML cache config options here: http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/reference/files-and-folders/files-in-the-config-folder/umbracosettingsconfig
Hi Nicholas,
Any news about running Umbraco on azure with multiple instance?
Do you have some feedback since I'm starting a project on which I will need azure hosting and multi-instance.
Could you take some of your time to give me some feedback?
Thanks for your time, David
Hi David,
I haven't tried it yet, but I do have an idea of how it might be done in a worst case scenario. Say you have www.site.com, and you are running it in Umbraco on Azure using multiple instances. I am guessing the front end website would run just fine, but I'm not sure if www.site.com/umbraco/umbraco.aspx (the back end) would work (I'm also not sure it would fail). To get around that, one could create umbraco.site.com and have it run the same content that is running on www.site.com, but make it single instance. You'd do any Umbraco interaction through umbraco.site.com/umbraco/umbraco.aspx, but the public site would be served up by www.site.com.
Now, anytime you published from umbraco.site.com, the Umbraco instances on www.site.com wouldn't know about the publish, so you'd have to let them know somehow (I dealt with that a bit in my above post). One idea would be to contact each of the instances directly (using the Azure API, assuming this is possible) and call an Umbraco API function to force the caches to update each time a publish is made on umbraco.site.com. Or a job could be created to periodically (say, once a minute) force a cache refresh on each server. Or maybe the cache could be disabled.
I've not tried that, but I don't see why it couldn't work. Let me know if you have any questions. And one final note. Umbraco 6 is out... checking out if that supports Azure would be worthwhile. I did notice that during the install process it gives "SQL Azure" as one of the database options, so that's promising.
Hi David & Nicholas,
There is no new support for Azure multiple instances in v6 unless you use the Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco. However it appears that there might be some progress on this front as on Tuesday 12th Feb a ServerRegistrationService was added to the 6.1.0 source. This is a very important service which will dramatically improve the ability to automate load balancing and also faciliate multiple instance native cloud deployments.
Keep an eye on 6.1!
Regards
Jeavon
Is there any update on this.
We are looking at rebuilding our existing site using Umbraco 7 as the CMS and deploying to Azure.
We have looked at the following -
1. Deploying to a Cloud service, 2 web roles 2 worker roles + use of the Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco - As this is a deprecated solution there is some hesitation going down this route.
2. Deploying to a Website across multiple instances, with the possibility to create 2 worker roles that communicate with the website.
Both solutions will be built with scaling out in mind as traffic spikes.
Has there been any change in Umbraco that will allow it to be deployed to an Azure cloud service (multiple web roles) without having to use the Accelerator?
Does anyone know if we will have issues if we deploy Umbraco 7 as an Azure website across multiple instance, will we hit some of the same issues as deploying to multiple web roles?
Hi Dan,
Not a lot of progress in this area as yet. Darren Ferguson gave a great session at the recent Umbraco UK Festival about the three flavours of Umbraco on Azure and I believe the videos will be online in the coming weeks.
Fundamentally if you want to use WebRoles for the scalability then you still need to use the Accelerator (Darren has a fork which has some improvements). You can use Azure VMs with Umbraco and without needing the accelerator and you can still load balance them by using DFS, again Darren is the expert for this setup. Alternatively there is Azure Web Sites but there is a challenge with communication between instances (Darren has a hack around this issue) and there is a limit of 10 instances.
Next year we will also have Umbraco as a service to consider also but I'm not sure if it is launching with multi instance support or if that will come later.
I don't think anyone has tried Umbraco v7 yet, but I think it is the same as v6 under the hood, so should be ok but no guarantee.
Jeavon
The video of Darren's session is now online at http://youtu.be/U7dVUHtpd_k
"Alternatively there is Azure Web Sites but there is a challenge with communication between instances (Darren has a hack around this issue) and there is a limit of 10 instances."
Are there details available anywhere of this hack ?
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