There have been already a lot of topics about Azure, but unfortunately none of them give us a how-to or referring to the latest version. It came to my understanding that Concorde is on its way, but since no date in the near future is set I cannot wait for it. So what I do in this post is describe what I have done and what worked and what not. My installation is still full of quirks so I hope I can get feedback on what will go wrong with my current installation and what to do about it.
1. Starting Point:
I created a solution containing UmbracoSite and Umbraco.Extensions. Extensions is where my mvc app goes and UmbracoSite is the standard site as can be downloaded from the web. So some coding later I have a website with my own exensions. Pressing Ctrl+F5 and my site runs smoothly in IISExpress.
2. Moving to Azure websites:
First I tried the Azure Websites part. That actually worked out of the box quite ok. I had copied my database into a new Azure SQL database and pointed my new site (installed via gallery in Azure Websites) to that database. So far no problem. Using webmatrix I copied over the dll's, views, scripts etc from my plugin into the appropriate folders and the site was running. I tried to use the VS2012 foundation server integration to deploy automatically but that failed. I read somewhere that TFS integration was not available yet. So I skipped that part.
Since I had the site running why bother looking further. There were two problems with Azure websites: (1) No RDC for tweaking some other stuff on the server like setting up FTP which I need for other purposes and (2) singe instance. So for purpose it would not be sufficient.
3. Moving to Azure Cloud instance
Then I tried cloud instance with web role. I searched the internet and everywhere I was pointed to the Umbraco Azure Accelerator. I tried to find it and found out it was deprecated. Also it didnt run on VS2012, probably because of some older version libraries. I didnt investigate further especially because of the label deprecated and the intended use with Umbraco 4 for that tool.
So I told myself why not pretend my Umbraco site is normal web project and follow the guides from Microsoft itself. I went ahead and created an Azure webrole project. The project guides me to creating endpoints and so on. So after a few minutes I was ready to deploy. A few quirks later the deployment process was executed and the instance was created on my staging environment.
Immediately after startup I got the first error about access to some TEMP folder under App_Data. I connected with the remote desktop and found out the instance was running under apppool under NetworkService. In the file explorer I changed the security of the TEMP folder and the site started running. After that I created a new image in img library via backend. Again an error and again access to a folder. This time app_data folder itself looking for modifying umbraco.config. This time I changed the security settings of App_Data folder. Now the site runs smoothly. I havent tried yet to change views, create scripts or stylesheets or what so ever in the backend yet. Probably will run into errors there as well.
What will happen if my instance gets flushed and recreated. Are my folder settings gone? And what happens to the newly uploaded images, edited views etc.? And can these issues be mitigated?
What happens if I choose 2 instances (instead of my current 1 instance) when I deploy to Azure, with my site?
Is there some kind of accelerator available for Umbraco 6.0.x? (according to Google not)
Can someone in the Umbraco team please provide us with a decent guide on how to set up version 6 on Azure Cloud? (not Azure websites)
Should I even bother with v6.0.x on Azure Cloud? Or should I just find a hosting provider and rent some space?
Any help is welcome and appreciated. I am a fond user of Umbraco, but the step to Azure is really necessary especially since Orchard, Sitefinity and other already provide easy add-ons to run smoothly on Azure.
Did you find answers for your questions? I actually looking at the same area, with no luck.
I'm doing a project involving creating multipale instances of Umbraco in Windows Azure. I'm not familier neither with Umbraco nor with Azure, but try to understand the two concepts and how we can create Umbraco instances without the risk of loosing our data if Azure goes down.
Another thing: I would also like to know what is the difference betwen creating those instances automaticly or manually.
Would appreciate if you helped me finding some answers or references where I can find some answers
Unfortunately I didn't find the answers. To be honest I left the Azure route for now and focusing on traditional hosting. At this moment this seems the savest option for me until some documentation and proven track record on Azure is shown.
Umbraco v6x and Azure
There have been already a lot of topics about Azure, but unfortunately none of them give us a how-to or referring to the latest version. It came to my understanding that Concorde is on its way, but since no date in the near future is set I cannot wait for it. So what I do in this post is describe what I have done and what worked and what not. My installation is still full of quirks so I hope I can get feedback on what will go wrong with my current installation and what to do about it.
1. Starting Point:
I created a solution containing UmbracoSite and Umbraco.Extensions. Extensions is where my mvc app goes and UmbracoSite is the standard site as can be downloaded from the web. So some coding later I have a website with my own exensions. Pressing Ctrl+F5 and my site runs smoothly in IISExpress.
2. Moving to Azure websites:
First I tried the Azure Websites part. That actually worked out of the box quite ok. I had copied my database into a new Azure SQL database and pointed my new site (installed via gallery in Azure Websites) to that database. So far no problem. Using webmatrix I copied over the dll's, views, scripts etc from my plugin into the appropriate folders and the site was running. I tried to use the VS2012 foundation server integration to deploy automatically but that failed. I read somewhere that TFS integration was not available yet. So I skipped that part.
Since I had the site running why bother looking further. There were two problems with Azure websites: (1) No RDC for tweaking some other stuff on the server like setting up FTP which I need for other purposes and (2) singe instance. So for purpose it would not be sufficient.
3. Moving to Azure Cloud instance
Then I tried cloud instance with web role. I searched the internet and everywhere I was pointed to the Umbraco Azure Accelerator. I tried to find it and found out it was deprecated. Also it didnt run on VS2012, probably because of some older version libraries. I didnt investigate further especially because of the label deprecated and the intended use with Umbraco 4 for that tool.
So I told myself why not pretend my Umbraco site is normal web project and follow the guides from Microsoft itself. I went ahead and created an Azure webrole project. The project guides me to creating endpoints and so on. So after a few minutes I was ready to deploy. A few quirks later the deployment process was executed and the instance was created on my staging environment.
Immediately after startup I got the first error about access to some TEMP folder under App_Data. I connected with the remote desktop and found out the instance was running under apppool under NetworkService. In the file explorer I changed the security of the TEMP folder and the site started running. After that I created a new image in img library via backend. Again an error and again access to a folder. This time app_data folder itself looking for modifying umbraco.config. This time I changed the security settings of App_Data folder. Now the site runs smoothly. I havent tried yet to change views, create scripts or stylesheets or what so ever in the backend yet. Probably will run into errors there as well.
From what I have understood how the accelerator works in this blog http://giannishub.cloudapp.net/en/2012/1/31/umbraco-on-windows-azure-%E2%80%93-part-1-of-n.aspx, which the author never ended, the file access is still a problem. And in a post on StackExchange I have understood that the new filesystemprovider is not ready yet for Azure.
My basic questions:
Any help is welcome and appreciated. I am a fond user of Umbraco, but the step to Azure is really necessary especially since Orchard, Sitefinity and other already provide easy add-ons to run smoothly on Azure.
Did you find answers for your questions? I actually looking at the same area, with no luck.
I'm doing a project involving creating multipale instances of Umbraco in Windows Azure. I'm not familier neither with Umbraco nor with Azure, but try to understand the two concepts and how we can create Umbraco instances without the risk of loosing our data if Azure goes down.
Another thing: I would also like to know what is the difference betwen creating those instances automaticly or manually.
Would appreciate if you helped me finding some answers or references where I can find some answers
Hi Nada,
Unfortunately I didn't find the answers. To be honest I left the Azure route for now and focusing on traditional hosting. At this moment this seems the savest option for me until some documentation and proven track record on Azure is shown.
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