I have a single page html application, that uses a lot of jQuery. The app content (data as xml and media audio/video/image) is (and has to be) provided by blobs on azure account. I don't need any application server.
What is the recommended way to host such single page html application on Windows Azure Environment (Azure is a requirement).
As I do not need any application server, all application files are currently uploaded into single container as Blobs with appropriate content types. It all works very good.
Still, I've seen that Azure has some website hosting capabilities I've been wondering if what I did is appropriate?
Thanks
Windows Azure Web Sites would work well and could be free for the duration. If the constraints of the free offering don't work for you, you can scale out easily.
You could also store your home page in Azure blob storage, but that means users would have to have the full path to it as there's no server configuration to specify a default page. Publicizing your site endpoint via a vanity URL from bit.ly or the like could make that a non-issue though.
Do note though, that by having everything in blob storage, you're incurring a transaction cost for every image, every page, every script access (that's not cached on the browser that is). Depending on the nature of your site and traffic, it could be more cost-effective to leverage something like Windows Azure Web Site for some of this.
Related
We use a app builder to create our applications, download them as .zip, and then just click "Add Application" on IIS, point to the application folder and it would be working.
Our applications require no server logic or database, they are self contained, the database is external and acessed via REST on javascript.
I can't seem to find the equivalent of the above procedure on Azure, it has options like Python/Node/Java/.NET but I'm not sure which of these fit our application needs.
How can I just easily upload a web app on Azure without any backend required?
If I'm understanding your question correctly, you can drag/drop a zip file into the "kudu" console of an Azure webapp to upload the file. Azure takes care of unzipping the file and putting the files in the web app.
To get to that portal, change your web app url to contain ".scm." and append /ZipDeploy to the end of the url:
https://yourwebapp.scm.azurewebsites.net/zipdeploy
Then drag/drop your file onto the web page.
From the main kudu page (remove zipdeploy from your url) you can upload entire directories of files if you need to. I regularly deploy webapps this way and it works great.
One of the easiest approaches is to make use of Azure App Services. This is Azure's Platform as a Service (Paas) offering that allows you to get a web site up fairly quickly whether that be a static site that is mostly client side logic or your more traditional apps such as asp.net\php\etc. You can deploy your app through various means from CI\CD, Github, FTP, etc. You can find more details and a 5 minute quickstart at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/.
More recently Azure has offered the ability to host static web sites right in Azure's Blob storage. It doesn't come with all the features of Azure App Services and does not have any server side execution but has the advantage of price and simplicity and when used in concert with some CDN networks it can be attractive for static client side only sites. More details at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-static-website
I'm building an app involves user uploaded content (images, docs, pdfs) and would like to consider azure web apps for the hosting solution. Of particular interest is the deployment slot feature.
I understand that using the deployment slots prevents me from storing the user content in the filesystem.
I'm not excited about using blob storage for the user uploaded content because that really ties my app to Azure and would make it difficult to move to another host or implement a vendor redundant DR site. Database storage isn't all that exciting to me either.
Ideally the web app would have a virtual directory mapped to that blob storage but I understand that isn't a possibility.
Are there any good solutions to this issue?
You can add web apps to a virtual network that allow you to store content on file shares on other machines in the vnet. Doing so allows the webapp to communicate with other machines on the network where you can configure a file share.
You could point the website to the share via the web.config/application settings section of the portal to point deployment slots to different shares, etc.
Here's an official link: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-create-vnet-arm-pportal/
I currently have a few websites that are running in IIS and they all have a virtual directory to another website called "Resources". On the resources website I have images, css, and other static type content that I share across multiple sites.
I want to replicate this using web roles. Yes they all need to be in a separate web role because they belong to different clients. I would like to just create a separate website for resources and have virtual directory from each of the other sites. Please advise if this is possible or if I need to keep these sites on a VM.
Yes such a solution is possible. You can move your static resources css, images etc to azure blob storage and link it from there. Code change required. If you think you need a content delivery network CDN you can use azure CDN. See this blog post explaining it www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingVideoMovingMyWebsitesImagesToTheAzureCDNAndUsingACustomDomain.aspx
A slightly older stackoverflow question explains it too.
stackoverflow.com/questions/6968011/storing-css-files-on-windows-azure
You cannot attach a shared disk, since disk-attaches have exclusive leases.
The Azure File Storage service provides an SMB share (backed by Azure Storage). By attaching to the share at startup, you'd be able to take advantage of a shared folder. More info on Azure File Storage here.
You may also populate a shared-content directory on each web role instance, at startup, by downloading content from a common source (e.g. Azure blob).
Aside from those built-in mechanisms, there are any number of custom VM-based solutions.
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'm considering moving from a dedicated server hosting environment to Azure. I'm using the ASP.NET Membership provider and every member has their own folder that houses their images (avatar, etc.). I have the Tinymce ImageManager wired up so that a logged-in user will only see their folder when selecting/uploading an image.
Is there a way to wire up the Tinymce ImageManager to Azure's blob storage in a similar way?
This thread on their site indicates that this is not yet supported:
http://www.tinymce.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=24776
The only way I see this accomplished is for you to rewrite parts of the Image Manager that perform I/O operations on the HDD. Which is no a rocket-science to implement.
Another way to move to Azure is to move your site for Windows Azure WebSites.