We have been looking to deploy an upcoming Umbraco site onto Azure. The client is a Bizspark member and combining some MSDN credits and also the need for additional services (MongoLab and Sendgrid) that are also available in the Store so Azure seems like a good fit. Also things as scaling, ease of management and CDN are on the plus side. On the other hand I have seen posts about Azure and issues with data layer, session state, provisioned sites reloading and other smaller issues. They might be for older versions of Umbraco and I guess Azure is updated rather frequently as well.
So I'm kinda wondering what the current status/recommendation is when going Azure with Umbraco. I want to avoid Azure VM and use Azure Websites instead. (It's 2013, why do I want to reboot machines after patch Tuesdays just to run a website?)
The http://umbraco.com/azure page seems to be outdated(?) with a video that is a couple of years old (MIX11) and a link to some defunct Github repo that no longer exists.
There seems to not be a lot of talk about Azure apart from people waiting for Umbraco as a Service. Or maybe I'm not looking in the right places :)
I saw a limited demo of "the project formerly known as Concorde" like 6 months ago when Niels visited UUGS in Stockholm but I have yet to been able to try it out myself. I filled out the request at http://umbraco.com/future but who knows what it means to be on a waiting list. It says October 2013 but our site is to be launched late November so I don't even know if UaaS is something I can wait for. We probably have to make a decision before that.
I made a test deployment of our site to Azure by creating a new website, scaled it to standard and deploying the files. Then in SQL Server Management Studio on my dev machine I used the Deploy to Azure wizard to transfer my database to SQL Azure. I also installed another Umbraco website provisioned from Azure web gallery. Reading up on SQL Azure and it being sort of a subset feature-wise I wanted to make sure schemas were the same and on all three locations they seem to be identical apart from login user. Local, deployed and provisioned that is.
Website seems to be running fine. So.. can I feel happy and comfortable with this?
Anyone have tips on pitfalls I have to watch out for?
You can run Umbraco on an Azure website but you can't scale horizontially only vertically (ie you can't have multiple instances just a bigger server/instance). But it works well but does randomly "bounce" for a few minutes each day when we've been testing...not sure why either. Its a Azure thing we believe. As far as I know you can't have SSL on websites without some fiddling around either.
Umbraco on Azure status (not as a service)
We have been looking to deploy an upcoming Umbraco site onto Azure. The client is a Bizspark member and combining some MSDN credits and also the need for additional services (MongoLab and Sendgrid) that are also available in the Store so Azure seems like a good fit. Also things as scaling, ease of management and CDN are on the plus side. On the other hand I have seen posts about Azure and issues with data layer, session state, provisioned sites reloading and other smaller issues. They might be for older versions of Umbraco and I guess Azure is updated rather frequently as well.
So I'm kinda wondering what the current status/recommendation is when going Azure with Umbraco. I want to avoid Azure VM and use Azure Websites instead. (It's 2013, why do I want to reboot machines after patch Tuesdays just to run a website?)
The http://umbraco.com/azure page seems to be outdated(?) with a video that is a couple of years old (MIX11) and a link to some defunct Github repo that no longer exists.
There seems to not be a lot of talk about Azure apart from people waiting for Umbraco as a Service. Or maybe I'm not looking in the right places :)
I saw a limited demo of "the project formerly known as Concorde" like 6 months ago when Niels visited UUGS in Stockholm but I have yet to been able to try it out myself. I filled out the request at http://umbraco.com/future but who knows what it means to be on a waiting list. It says October 2013 but our site is to be launched late November so I don't even know if UaaS is something I can wait for. We probably have to make a decision before that.
I made a test deployment of our site to Azure by creating a new website, scaled it to standard and deploying the files. Then in SQL Server Management Studio on my dev machine I used the Deploy to Azure wizard to transfer my database to SQL Azure. I also installed another Umbraco website provisioned from Azure web gallery. Reading up on SQL Azure and it being sort of a subset feature-wise I wanted to make sure schemas were the same and on all three locations they seem to be identical apart from login user. Local, deployed and provisioned that is.
Website seems to be running fine. So.. can I feel happy and comfortable with this?
Anyone have tips on pitfalls I have to watch out for?
TIA
Magnus
Hi Magnus,
You can run Umbraco on an Azure website but you can't scale horizontially only vertically (ie you can't have multiple instances just a bigger server/instance). But it works well but does randomly "bounce" for a few minutes each day when we've been testing...not sure why either. Its a Azure thing we believe. As far as I know you can't have SSL on websites without some fiddling around either.
Other than that you are good to go.
Pete
Pete, still the same or did you find a way of scaling it horizontially?
Highly recommend you watch the video of Darren Ferguson talking about the three flavours of Azure at the UK Festival
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