so I have several websites running on Azure. One has its own instance, and I know I can upgrade that by just updating the code. But quite a few websites I have are Azure Websites. I installed Orchard from the gallery. Orchard 1.6 has just been released, not on the gallery yet, but will be soon I assume. Is there a way of upgrading my existing websites to 1.6 when it is released?
Or do I have to like ftp the latest code?
Azure web sites are like a regular hosting plan: you upgrade the same way you would anywhere else (WebDeploy, FTP, Git...). See http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Upgrading-a-site-to-a-new-version-of-Orchard
Related
To avoid more questions like Azure Websites, Can one deploy .NET 4.5.1 websites? and Azure Websites, Can one deploy .NET 4.5.2 websites, is there a web site that lists all the .NET Frameworks that are supported in Azure Web Sites?
I don't know if there's any specific blog post or reference listing, but... here's a quick-n-easy way for you to check for yourself. Note: This requires you to already have a Web Site up and running. You can spin up a new free-tier website really quickly. Then:
Navigate to the Kudu portal for your website, at https://yourwebsite.scm.azurewebsites.net
Go to the Debug Consule menu and choose CMD or PowerShell:
]
Navigate to D:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework and you'll see assembly directories for each installed framework version:
I realize this isn't automated, but at least it's a way for you to make a quick determination. I don't know if this will always work this way, or if it's the only way or the best way. Just showing you a way.
I notice that Azure Websites seems to offer .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.5. So I assume that one cannot deploy .NET 4.5.1 web applications yet?
I mention this as .NET 4.5.1 seems to have a useful new feature called "ASP.NET app suspension" which seems to pull back app images much more quickly into RAM. Perhaps Although this feature is targeted at hosters, one wonders whether this is a solution to the "Warm Up" issue?
Thanks in advance.
There are two questions here.
1) Azure Web Sites does support .NET 4.5.1, as in the update is installed on all Azure Web Site VMs. This has been available for several months now. So when you select 4.5, you are really running 4.5.1. The version reading "4.5" in the portal is misleading, unfortunately, and due to the fact the 4.5.1 upgrade did not change major/minor versions of framework so the "4.5" remains.
2) The specific "ASP.NET application suspension feature" unfortunately is part of a .NET 4.5.1 version that only ships in Windows 8.1/Server 2012R2. Azure Web Sites VMs currently only run Server 2012. Therefore ASP.NET application suspension is not supported in Azure Web Sites.
Azure Web Sites does other things to attempt to manage cold start performance issues (such as aggressive caching of compiled assemblies) but this is certainly a feature we would like to add in a future version of WAWS. Thanks for the feedback.
Cloud Services supports .NET 4.5.1
look here
I signed up for the free azure website (not web role) and installed DNN 7 from the app catalog. So far so good.
My concern: The last time I checked (and I could be wrong) the application package that is published to azure is immutable and if you want to make changes to it, you must publish a whole new package to azure. Since DNN allows for upgrades and module installations, are these changes persisted? Can you still upgrade DNN by FTP'ing the upgrade package over the installation? If not how do you do it? I know about the dotnetnuke accelerator for web roles but I want to stick with the azure websites for now.
The immutable thing is for Web Roles, not Azure Web Sites. If you make a change to a web site, it is persisted.
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...