I'm about to migrate several separate ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms applications to Azure. Several are apps using SQL Server 2008. I'm seeing "conflicting" tutorials for this:
Deploying an ASP.NET Web Application to a Windows Azure Web Site and SQL Database
vs
Deploying an ASP.NET Web Application to a Windows Azure Cloud Service and SQL Database
This StackOverflow question goes some way towards explaining this. However, there have been several changes to Azure in recent months and I'm not sure how up to date the information is.
I want as simple a migration process as possible because of the number of sites I have to migrate. Is there a situation where I would have to use the Cloud Service route?
Aside from what the linked-to answer provides: You have to go the Cloud Service route if there are apps you need to install (e.g. an MSI, COM object, etc.). There's simply no facility to do this with Web Sites. In Web Sites, you cannot alter the VM instance at all. With Cloud Services, you have lots of flexibility to install software, alter IIS behavior, pretty much anything you need to do (as long as the installs can be automated).
One point which can be very valuable if you consider migration of ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms applications - Microsoft Azure Websites do no support SSL for custom domains yet. That might be a blocker for your migration work to the Websites service.
Note that Windows Azure is very dynamic environment with great number of new features coming every new release. In order to be up-to-date I would suggest following ScottGu's Blog to find out about new features and their release dates.
EDIT
Windows Azure Website supports SSL for custom domains now. SSL Certificates and SSL bindings can be configured in Configure tab.
You can also read more about SSL configuration for Azure Website at Configuring an SSL certificate for a Windows Azure web site.
Related
I am quite new to azure and need a quick pointer to how to host an asp.net website in Azure VM. Thanks for your help in advance.
A little background...
We were using a windows server 2012 R2 and were hosting the site in IIS 6. This was an intranet site. Now we are migrating to public cloud so that it is accessible over internet. For this we have acquired an Azure VM (Windows OS). We have installed Visual studio 2013 and SQL server 2012 here. I have installed azure core SDK too.
Here are my questions:
What do I use instead of IIS to host? (Because I am not able to find any related app in azure VM)
Do I need to buy any more licenses for the same?
Should I host it in IIS only and because it is in public cloud, will it be accessible over internet?
Appreciate your help!
Since you have chosen the Infrastructure as a service ( IaaS) route you have to simply replicate the setup that you have on premises.
if IIS component is not there you just have to enable it in windows features.
If you do not want to use IIS you can explore self hosted asp.net applications.
Since you have chosen the Windows server VM image and created the VM you do not need to pay for anything additional for windows license.
By default only 2 endpoints( ports) will be open in a Windows VM. 1 for remote desktop and other for powershell remoting.
refer this post for enabling endpoints for you hosted applications.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/virtual-machines-windows-classic-setup-endpoints
You have two options basically
Use Azure Paas - Here you would host your existing application as a Cloud service using a web role and a Azure SQL Database. This might mean some changes to the existing application but would need less management from you. You can find the migration steps here
Use Azure Iaas - This is pretty much what you are trying to do. Host your application to a VM and manage all the required software (IIS,Sql server etc) on your own. Although this option might be easier in terms of migrating your application it involves managing the infrastructure on your own. Here is a link on how to install IIS on a Azure VM.
You don't need any additional licenses since you are paying for the VM which includes all required licenses. In case you decide to use SQL Server as Iaas you can also use your existing SQL Server license when running SQL Server on an Azure VM.
We have multiple clients and we use Azure web sites to host our web application. When we upgrade a client to a newer version of our software we have to upgrade all of our clients to the latest version.
We would like to be able to upgrade a subset of clients when we release a new version. This would give us the ability to test that the new solution is working properly before we bring all of our clients to the new version. We would like to offer a beta version option to selected clients so that they can access new features of our software and are aware that the version they are using is still in a 'beta' mode.
When we deploy a new version we would like to create a web site just for this new version whilst leaving the other clients on the more stable previous version. To do this we are thinking of writing a reverse proxy that directs traffic to the different versioned web sites depending on the client.
Can we host multiple versions of the web site using the same Azure web site. (IIS directories) The documentation I have read relating to this does not mention being able to build multiple versions of the web site based on different code bases.
Is there a way to set up the build so that each new version is deployed to a directory on the Azure same web site so we can effectively host multiple versions of our app under the same azure web site?
We could do every versioned build to a new Azure web site but this could get quite expensive as we run two instances so as to maintain a good SLA. It is feasible that we could end up with ten versions in the wild at once, running 20 Azure web sites to support these versions could get expensive. How can we save on costs and give our clients a good experience?
You can have up to 5 deployment slots including production on azure web apps. Each slot can use a different branch of your source control system like git or tfs. If you use any of these two, deploy is also automatic (continuous deployment) and you can swap slots any time very fast with minimium to none downtime. Each slot has it's own url for external access.
To save costs, you can run multiple web apps on the same hosting plan. There's no limit for the number of web apps running on the same hosting plan. For each hosting plan it's possible to have 10 small/medium/large instances.
Set up staging environments for web apps in Azure App Service
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-staged-publishing/
Azure App Service plans in-depth overview
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/azure-web-sites-web-hosting-plans-in-depth-overview/
Yes this is possible. In management portal, You need to configure the details for the IIS virtual directory or application in the website’s configuration.
Ref - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tomholl/archive/2014/09/22/deploying-multiple-virtual-directories-to-a-single-azure-website.aspx
I'm looking to host a CMS-driven ASP.NET web application using Azure cloud services.
I'm new to Azure but have successfully managed to configure a basic Visual Studio project and publish it to an Azure web role from Visual Studio.
The application I'm building will have a very specific configuration where the IIS default web site will itself contain multiple IIS applications, each configured with physical path pointing to the same directory as the main website.
So what I'd like to know is, can this kind of setup be configured within the Visual Studio project. If so, can anyone explain how? If not, how can I ensure that my auto-scaling web roles all adopt the correct IIS configfuration?
By using the Sites element within the service definition file, ServiceDefinition.csdef, you can configure your web role to support multiple websites and web applications. This is accomplished using the sites, applications, and virtual directories features in Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0. These features enable each web role in Azure to support configuration for multiple websites and applications.
Reference: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/gg433110.aspx
Hope this helps.
-Nithin
Is there a way I can deploy my entire website/webapp to an Azure WebRole without the need of Visual Studio?
Context: We have a test environment where there's an IIS hosted web app where our testers test (of course). The thing is, we want to grab that exact tested web app folder and deploy it "as is" to a WebRole.
Please avoid commenting on our procedure, we have been looking at it and we will eventually change it if we have to, I just need a 'simple' yes(how)/no answer.
IIS Web Deploy can be used to package/migrate/restore IIS applications. It can be enabled while deploying a web role as described in this article and allows to update the web role with the application as deployed in your test environment.
Be aware that only single instance cloud services are supported and that in case of a maintenance operation by the fabric controller, your service will be rolled back to the state created by the initial azure package deployment. (There once was a tool for syncing between multi-instance web deployments but sadly that did not work out too well and is no longer supported. Do not attempt to use or rebuild it.)
Installing and Configuring Web Deploy shows the steps to get web deploy for your local testing IIS while articles on using web deploy like this one show examples for calling the tool.
Another option to evaluate are azure websites and git deployment. This could provide you with a documented and reproducible form of deployment that is not prone to unwanted rollbacks while allowing the service to scale to multiple instances. This option might not work out if the application it too tied to the web roles infrastructure or contains code not suitable for the more restricted web sites environment.
A third option to look at is using CSPack as presented in this article. You basically create a service definition and package up the webapp manually without building it in Visual Studio or TFS.
Yes - make sure you have enabled Remote Access on your webrole. Then copy your web app from your local IIS folder to F:\sitesroot\0 (NOTE - may be E:\sitesroot\0 on same web roles).
Yes, you can write a programmatic interface against Web Deploy from your C# code. If you're deploying to Azure Web Sites, you could also use the Windows Azure Management Libraries to spin up new web sites or clouand deploy them.
I currently work with a legacy asp.net web application and one of the requirements going forward is that it be deployable to windows azure.
I would like to know how difficult it will be to manage deployment to both Azure and a traditional IIS web server.
Azure seems to require a specific customized version of a web applicaiton project is it possible to deploy the customized web application to a standard IIS instance once it has been converted.
EDIT:
It is a ASP.NET Web Application rather than a Web Site (compiles everything into one dll)
UPDATE:
In the end due to the amount of work involved in converting the application to work in Azure and the cost of Azure compared with other cloud solutions it was decided to go with a traditional Cloud hosted virtual server.
And thank you for the really good answers.
Whether or not you can deploy your application to Azure almost as is depends a lot on how your application works. Azure pretty much requires your application be stateless. If it's a plain vanilla web application that stores data in the session or application cache only and saves data to a database only, then you can deploy it to Azure.
If you have stateful services running like background threads (which is bad anyways), or if you save data to the file system (besides temporary caching), then you may have issues. Really, the issues moving to Azure are really the same as moving to any multi-server load balanced solution. One caveat is permanent storage.
If you need to store data in a place other than the database, then you're best off working with Azure's storage solution which has an API and client library for storing binary data, key/value data (they call it tables, but really, it's not tables), and queues. They also do have a transparent blob-as-file-system option for compatibility. If you want to use these in your app that also is used outside of Azure then you need to write an extra layer between your code and the Azure client library that supports both Azure services and standard local service. Azure SDK does include emulators for Azure services, but they're definitely not meant for production use.
As far as the mechanics of Azure-specific projects, that is actually not that difficult. Yes, you need to create an Azure-specific project in your solution that defines the Web Role and what gets deployed, but it will reference your existing Web Application, not the other way around. You can deploy the Azure Web Role to Azure or you can continue to deploy the existing application to IIS normally and concurrently.
Web Site, Web Application, MVC, really doesn't make much of a difference. Actually doesn't have to be .NET either. Can be PHP or Java or whatever you want to put on your VM. It'll all work the same as far as Azure is concerned.
MS likes to push Azure as a Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) solution where they have a ton of services they offer and you run apps on their standard platform, and contrasts that with Amazon AWS which they call Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) which is "just" a Virtual Machine. However, MS is really just as much a IaaS solution as AWS, perhaps even more so. The only difference between AWS and Azure is AWS allows you to choose what to install on your VM and with Azure you have to use Windows Server 2008 R2 as the basis for your VM (but you can customize the VM image to install custom software on top of windows). With both Azure and AWS, the hosts offer additional PaaS services you can take advantage of for data storage and message routing. AWS also offers tons of extra services like video streaming.
Also note that with Azure (and AWS I think) you can use the services they offer even in a non-hosted application. If you want to use Azure's data storage from a non-Azure application, you can do that, it's just HTTP REST calls to get/put data. The only differences you pay for data in/out between datacenter and your non-datacenter-hosted application which would be free if the app was also inside the datacenter (just the data in/out is free in-datacenter, you still have storage and transaction fees).
A few things:
Samuel Neff's answer mentioned mounting a file system in a blob (a Cloud Drive). Only one instance may lock this cloud drive for writing, so it does not behave like a network file share. You'll need to plan for this.
You'll need to integrate with the Windows Azure diagnostics subsystem, to gain visibility into your app's run state (e.g. performance counters, trace logs, etc.).
If there are 3rd-party apps that your web app depends on, you'll need to install these. These actually get installed as part of the role instance's boot process, either via your OnStart() event handler or as a startup task. The latter allows for admin-level installs (including registry changes, COM component installations, etc.). You'll need to carefully manage these installations, as they impact the boot time of the instance.
For an asp.net app, you'll need to think about session state. In-proc session state won't work, because each instance will have its own state store in memory. The SQL Azure session state provider doesn't have background cleanup agents, so you'll need to build this into your web or worker role instance (see this blog post by the SQL Azure team for the implementation). The best option is to use the AppFabric Cache, a new service that just went into production. This cache-as-a-service provides an custom session state provider for asp.net as well. Note: As of today, the AppFabric Cache service is only accessible via a .NET interface; there's no REST interface for it (all other storage services - tables, blobs, queues - have a REST interface). .NET, Java, and PHP all have storage client libraries. Ruby has one from the open source community.
You'll have to manage scaling out to more than one instance, when the need arises. This is not a built-in service today, but there are 3rd-party services such as ParaLeap's AzureWatch. There's also Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager, which now has Windows Azure monitoring support. You'll also need to handle scale-back situations, where you reduce the number of server instances.
I have some additional details in an answer for a similar StackOverflow question, here.
I have not tried Windows Azure Migration Scanner personally, but if it works as advertised, this would really come in handy.