I am deploying Umbraco 6.05 to Windows Azure. I am currently using "Azure Web Sites" to do this, but from what I can glean, it appears that this may cause future problems with the storage of media being on the local file system (both due to space limitations and also due to scaling considerations). The site was created and uploaded using WebMatrix.
I have found various articles about using Blob Storage for this, but they all refer to "Cloud Services" and "Web Roles" - none of which seem to match with the current terminology used on Azure, and to be totally honest I am not that familiar with Azure yet anyway. I have also found various "accelerators" for previous versions but nothing for this version.
Can anybody provide any links to a definitive guide to the installation of this version of Umbraco as an Azure Web Site, utilising Azure Blob Storage where appropriate? If this is not feasible, perhaps further advice can be provided as to the recommended way of hosting Umbraco in Azure.
There are no different in term of how they store the file whether you use Web Sites or Cloud Services as long as you didn't modify the Umbraco.
Both Web Sites and Cloud Services keep the file, in this case, the Media folder in their local storage unless you modify Umbraco to save into Blob Storage to have a better scaling.
You can write and modify your own custom Media location or try to look at this URL http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/universal-media-picker
Related
I want to deploy Kentico 9 site on Azure and want to use shared file system for my media content, can you please suggest which Azure configuration (Azure Cloud Services or Azure Web Apps) I should referred?
I'd highly recommend going with Web App over Cloud Services. Mainly because Web App is almost like running on a regular server where Cloud Services is quite a bit different and harder to work with in my opinion.
Check this article out regarding some issues with Kentico and Azure Blog storage as well as how to setup your storage provider to only store media files.
http://www.kehrendev.com/blog/brenden-kehren/may-2016/problems-with-azure-and-kentico
Could you describe what do you mean by shared file system for my media content?
From my experience - it`s (a little bit) easier to deploy (and maintain) Kentico to Azure Web Apps but they do not provide so many customizations - in my humble opinion - the biggest one is you are not able to connect via remote desktop (but this is supported by Azure Cloud Services).
Please note - if you are using Cloud Services you must use Azure Blob Storage - source - which could be in conflict with your requirements.
You can find more information about Web Apps vs Cloud Services vs Virtual Machines on the mentioned page.
TL;DR; - if you do not need customizations, remote desktop and startup tasks - go for WebApps. If not, try to specify more requirements.
You can also check comparinson of the technologies from the Microsoft`s point of view here.
It's not clear who you want to share the media with...
If you want to share the assets amongst more Kentico instances or with a 3rd party system, I'd probably use the Azure Blob Storage. Kentico comes with a dedicated file provider for this exact use out of the box. It's called CMS.AzureStorage.
Using the blob storage is not a limiting factor in terms of hosting your app. You can still use all available options: Web Apps, VM or Cloud Service. There are some technical implications, of course. But they're all described in the documentation.
I recommend checking the comparison matrix to find a hosting option that suits your need best. Kentico recommends using App Service (Web Apps) for most projects as it's easiest to maintain. However, you can't use certain features like Kentico Windows services, for instance. Question is, do you really need them?
Quick question. I'm looking to deploy a website to Azure using websites.
I read a comment that stated that the file system is shared across multiple instances of the website?
Is this true?
Does this mean if I upload an image to the file system
on one instance, all requests on the second instance will have
access to the file?
Are the files synced across the instances or do
they all point to a single drive i.e. in the blob storage somewhere?
We will be deploying an Umbraco 7 site, so I still need to test for any issue this might have on the lucene indexing etc. Does anyone know of any complications with Umbraco 7 and this method of deployment?
Thanks in advance
Gordon
The answer from bedane is incorrect. This question is about Azure Web Sites (not about Azure Web Roles)
1) Yes it is true. Azure Web Sites stores your content using Azure Storage blobs that are mounted and presented to the web site as a common share that is read/writable.
2) By virtue of 1), when you upload the file you are uploading it to the common share and therefore all instances will see the upload immediately.
3) The instances all point to a single drive (just repeating point 1)
This architecture for Azure Web Sites was designed specifically to enable applications like Umbraco, Wordpress, etc. that install plugins and make changes directly to the site content directory. This design point fixes the problem that currently exists in Azure Web Roles.
I am currently experimenting with installing Orchard on Azure using the recently released "Web Sites" functionality.
I have successfully installed and setup Orchard using the template from the gallery and so far everything seems to be going well.
My question is: If I scale up the site to use 3 instances is there anything special I need to do to ensure that the instances all work from the same cache? So a new page appears on all instances at once.
I have a little experience with Umbraco and I had to push documents and the cache into blob storage for it to work correctly.
Is this already taken care of by the template?
Thanks for your help,
Dan
There is a guide on the Orchard website that explains how to deploy to a Windows Azure Web Role (Cloud Service). I haven't seen an implementation for Windows Azure Web Sites that supports more than one reserved instance.
In order to make Orchard work on multiple reserved instances you'll need to configure it to use the AzureBlobStorageProvider, which will make sure files are persisted to blob storage instead of local filesystem. This is how you would configure the Sites.config:
<component instance-scope="per-lifetime-scope"
type="Orchard.Azure.FileSystems.Media.AzureBlobStorageProvider, Orchard.Azure"
service="Orchard.FileSystems.Media.IStorageProvider">
</component>
In your Global.asax.cs you'll also want to make sure the storage account information is read from the web.config:
CloudStorageAccount.SetConfigurationSettingPublisher(
(configName, configSetter) =>
configSetter(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[configName])
);
I am looking at migrating a dotnetnuke website to Azure. I need both staging and production versions of the site to be running.
I have looked at using Azure Websites, but at the moment there is no support for SSL on custom domains so this can't be used for the production website. I have migrated the staging site to an Azure Website and now have numerous options for publishing updates (ftp, git, using web matrix).
Due to the constraints of Azure Websites, I used the DNN Accelerator to create a cloud service for the production environment. This set up will allow me to have control over IIS and therefore manage SSL certificates (I think).
The problem I have with this is there does not seem to be any publishing options. The only way I can publish is by connecting to the Azure instance via RDP and then copying the website files onto the files system.
Are there any other ways of publishing? I have looked at converting the website to a WAP, but I believe this has implications when it comes to updating to new DNN versions.
You should never publish your application through RDP since these changes are non-persistent (meaning what you published might disappear after a hardware failure / ...). Adding new instances would also mean that these instances don't have the files you published before.
I suggest you start by looking at the DotNetNuke Azure Accelerator first. If this doesn't fit your needs you might always try to build something yourself, but if you want to say with a regular website and not a web application I wouldn't count on Visual Studio support. In that case you might want to look at creating a package from the command line and using startup scripts to add your website in IIS.
Sounds like you need to use a Start-up task to install the files in the correct place for a Web Role (Cloud Service) Smarx has a nice overview here, MSDN has a wealth of info too http://blog.smarx.com/posts/introduction-to-windows-azure-startup-tasks
Another option is IAAS for Azure with a persisted VM, more work mind you, Cloud Service would be the most efficient and correct solution...
I'm curious to know if this is possible, and if so, is it a good or bad idea?
We are developing an Azure application that is largely centered around worker roles that receive their work on a CloudQueue, and put the results in a CloudBlob, that the client then downloads. The web interface itself is a dead-simple ASP.NET MVC site that throws jobs in the CloudQueue, and builds URLs to download CloudBlobs.
Currently we accomplish this by having a Azure Cloud Project in our solution, which has a Web Role with the UI, and Worker Roles with the actual work.
Could we use Azure Websites to publish and host the UI, which calls back to our Worker Roles? The Azure DLLs are just regular old .NET libraries, I'm assuming Azure Websites won't have a problem with them. So, when we want to update the UI, we just publish with Visual Studio. And when we want to update the Worker Role - which is 300MB+ and has a bunch of nasty dependencies like Crystal Reports - we can build the cloud bundle and update the Cloud Service through the Azure management portal.
This seems to me like doing this would make it easier to update the UI. I think it would also be cheaper to host it, as we won't have to buy a bunch of instances for the Web Role.
If your question is "Could we use Windows Azure Websites*", based on your application architecture, you sure can use Azure Website to deploy your front end and configure all the networking connection properly so you can continue access other Azure Storage services. As you are using mostly Blob and Queue, you can continue use HTTP/HTTPS settings in the Azure websites. You can keep worker role by as it is however if it is very complex to deploy, using Windows Azure VM may be another direction to go.
I could say website deployment could be easier if your web app does not have something complex to configure in web server as websites may not be able to match web server level configuration compare to webrole and Azure VM. Answering "Easier and cheap" could be very subjective as this is all depend on load and distribution so you would have to try and evaluate it.