Understanding Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 Windows Azure Support

Hi all,

thanks for your questions. Based on them we are preparing detailed information about Windows Azure itself and our support of it and it will be published in few days.

At this time we discovered that Windows Azure SDK 1.3 is different from version SDK 1.2 (which Kentico CMS 5.5R2 supports now) with several breaking changes. We are working on it.

Rabi N: You cannot do so with Kentico CMS 5.5R2. As alternative you can rent/buy required number of servers.

Michal: I got questions for you.

How about upgrading and hotfixing Azure instance? Seems like I have to create a new package every time I want to update. Thats OK, but can you show (for version 6) how to perform upgrade without interrupting the service aka no downtime?

Are you planning to include some backup/restore functionality inside Kentico (it might be a seperate program because CMS may fail) this would be really nice in Azure as there are no Backup and Restore products or direct support in Azure itself, this is a show stopper for us.

Will you simplify scaling out in Azure? As I understand it you have to create a WebFarm or add a server to a WebFarm, which is not automatic and very slow. I do expect the cloud application to be able to scale-out automatically, without user/administrator intervention. That's 100% cloud support, anything else is just like Kentico 5.5R2 :=)
For example: I create a new website, define maximum number of servers (instances) based on my license limitations, define threshold for starting/ending instance and voilà it works. That would be something.

Can you provide detail how to implement scalable cms solution using kentico and azure ? As above post says that kentico has limitation it does not support multiple instance. So, how we can create scalable scoluiont alternatively ?

Hi,
I try to move our website to Azure.
I scanned the dev. Guide for “How to prepare and deploy your website to Windows Azure”.
where do I find the article? Thansk -eric

Hi all,

Kentico company is transparent for our customers and we want to inform you about possible pitfalls with Windows Azure. We think, it's better to inform you, then to make an announcement without any additional information and solve "problems" with limited features via "forums" as others do ....

Regarding the MediaLibraries, we are speaking about the module "MediaLibrary" not about mediafiles in general. You are able to store any mediafile in the document tree, as the attachement etc. in the cloud.

I understand that you don't care about the file-system. Kentico CMS (and other CMSs) uses built-in 3rd party components, which are file-system based and we have to either modify them or try to find "any cloud based". It's problem of SmartSearch (based on Lucene.Net) and Import/Export (using ZIP). So, we are looking for the way, how to offer you these features as soon as possible.

The response here is quite unsatisfactory. again I ask what is th point of offereing azure support with such a limited set of features. Azure doesn't have a file system? No, by design, this is the cloud! The real point is that kentico doesn't support cloud storage mechanisms until v6 at earliest. I think you need to get hold of tge marketing dept on this one!

We are currently building our own hooks into cloud storage so that kentico editor can pull and push media files to and from the cloud. Thus is the type of sensible solution to a real problem I believe you should be focussed on rather than adding more and more modules to the core cms.

Thanks for clarification Michal.

We don't really care about some file system support in Azure. We only care that import/export, Smart search or Media libraries don’t work in there. Or do they?

What I and probably others expect from "Azure support" is fully working CMS without any limitation. Current support seems like the very basic one, as you weren’t able to implement the features in a way the Azure environment requires it (or limit you). I got a feeling like “there is no native support for this and this, so we don’t care. Kentico just can’t work as usual, but it’s still fully supported?!”

If you want to say that Azure is not mature yet, then I don’t understand this at all. I am not saying it’s a wrong way to go Cloud. I am big supporter of Cloud! I am just saying this is false advertisement.

I have also noticed interesting cloud reference in last newsletter: “Cloud is the big topic in these days. We already have some clients who run Kentico in Amazon EC2 and now we are adding also support for Windows Azure“.
Did you realize that in case of EC2 you just rent a virtual machine running Windows and there is absolutely no reason for the Kentico not to run in there, also you didn’t have to do (and you didn’t) anything at all to support EC2 (or any other virtual machine). Or is there any extra integration between Amazon Cloud Services and Kentico?
But in case of Windows Azure you are speaking of something completely different, you actually have to do something… Unless you were speaking about VM role where again, you don’t have to do anything at all to support it as it’s almost the same as EC2.

It's not so easy to answer all comments. So just few facts:
1) Windows Azure doesn't support any file-system based operations. So, any system has to use SQL Azure or Azure storage. 5.5R2 supports at this time SQL Azure.
2) Microsoft released Azure drive which enables to use a VHD file in Windows Azure. We are testing it with Kentico CMS 5.5R2
3) You pay money for the size of SQL Azure and Azure Storage
4) You don't pay for the communication between application and SQL Azure when running in one datacenter.
5) You PAY for the communication between application and Azure storage even when you are running inside one data center.
6) SQL Azure doesn't support Full-text yet.

Hi,
I completely agree, it's useless. Kentico, can you please provide an example were Azure hosting with Kentcio CMS 5.5 R2 would make any sense at all? It seems like all you are saying is that it would be sort of supported as an expensive single instance proposition with a limited feature set!?

You should basically say wait until v6. That's what we're telling our clients.

Correct me if I am wrong but this kind of so called Azure support is completely useless. What website will you be able to run and what website will actually benefit from this cloud at all? I don't have to mention that the price for cloud is way too much for small projects (I don't even think the price is OK for our bigger projects anyway).

Would it be possible to publish a single reference of website running this version inside of a Azure cloud? Because I just don't believe it,sorry :-)

Version 5.5R2 supports only SQL Azure. Using Azure Blob storages requires deep changes in Kentico CMS which are implemented in version 6.0.

Is the Azure support initially limited to SQL Azure. Are attachments going to be stored in Azure blob storage? Obviously SQL Azure is quite an expensive way to store imagery and video so unless you are using Azure blob storage this approach will not be feasible or cost effective for many, particularly given the single instance limitation, why would you do this??