.Kirkegaard: Sitecore Azure

When I started looking into Sitecore Azure, the following was what I needed to find - not a long technical review written like a short story - but a very short sum up of the Sitecore Azure giving me just enough info for my further readings - hope you find it usefull ...

Options for Sitecore Azure deployment

Sitecore offers 3 options for Sitecore Azure 3.0 Deployment with Development environment on-premise for all solutions. Notice that you only have one Editing Farm per Environment – though many farms around the Windows Azure locations are possible.

Azure Delivery (on-premises for Sitecore installation for content editing, and multiple Sitecore Content Delivery farms in multiple Azure locations)
Azure Live Mode (Master Database maintained on Azure and normal Sitecore “Live mode”)
Azure Authoring + Delivery (Full scaled Azure solution with content editing and content delivery in multiple Azure locations)

Using Sitecore Azure

Sitecore has created applications inside the Sitecore Desktop for creating and managing the Sitecore Azure environment, making it easy for you to manage your Sitecore Azure solution. This includes installations of Sitecore Azure, setting up the Azure environment and specifying the number of instances, size of the virtual machine, database options etc., deploy solution to the Azure cloud (for development, test or production environment) based on each Azure location.

Note:
Some Sitecore Azure operations will course ASP.NET to restart.
Sitecore Azure user interface may seem unresponsive because of long-running remote service calls.

Before starting up

Before starting up your Sitecore Azure project there are a lot consideration you should be aware of. To give you an idea hereof a couple of those could be:

Azure instances are volatile by design – design your architecture to reflect this
Consider any of your integrations to internal applications
For ASP.NET session management you should use the DistributedCacheSessionStateStoreProvider
SQL Azure limits the maximum database size to 150GB (At the moment)
Sitecore Azure does not support file media

Deployment of Sitecore DMS with Azure

It is posible to deploy Sitecore DMS on Microsoft Azure (Sitecoer Azuer 3) but you ave to follow certain guidelines considering three areas

Computing resources
Server chace for session state data
Your database resources

Available Azure deployment locations

North Europe, West Europe, East Asia, South East Asia, South Central US, North Central US, East US, West US.

Two types of subscriptions

Microsoft Azure Subscription
Sitecore-Managed Azure Subscription (benefits of Sitecore’s automated features for managing Azure installations, licensing benefits to bursting and prioritized support etc)

Benefits of using Sitecore Azure

Scalability, stability (99,9%)
Easily create more environments as needed (a full size copy of production environment for performance testing, spin up environment when need it, an extra training environment for just 1 week or so…)
Deployment of new code without taking down the environment or restarting IIS (managed by Azure load balancer)
Load balancers, firewalls, sql redundancy is out of the box
Low cost – no need of in house servers

.Kirkegaard

Sitecore Azure