Hi,

I have managed to run mojoPortal on Azure using the same Accelerator as Umbraco and have a modified version of it that I will release soon to make it easier, but other customers have already deployed to Azure using the Umbraco Azure Accelerator. The main thing is you can't use the internal Lucene search engine with Azure, so you would need to use google or bing for site search and disable the internal search index because Lucene doesn't support multiple processes. There may be a solution for that in the future but not at the moment.

I have implemented a file system plugin layer that works with Azure Blob storage but with the Accelerator it is not needed because the files uploaded to the web roles are automatically synced since all the files including the installation files are synced between Azure blob storage and all the web role instances.

I have not yet decided whether any of the additional components I've implemented for Azure will be products or not but when you consider how expensive Azure hosting is I don't think anyone would balk at paying for needed components.

I don't agree with the statement "Cloud is the way to go", it is high end expensive hosting and most sites don't need that. When you start to see the bills for Azure and SqlAzure you may change your mind.

I still have a good bit of work yet to do with Azure and the modified Accelerator and documentation, but I've paused my work on it for the moment because it has taken longer than expected and other things need to be done.

Best,

Joe

With the release of mojoPortal 2.3.7.5 we now have some guidance for installing mojoPortal on Azure.

I still contend that Azure is high end expensive hosting. Any hosting starting at $70-80/month is high end, its just the low end of high end. But I think you can add $45/month to that because you'll need AppFabric cache as well. Azure might be economical vs setting up and managing your own physical web farm but most people really don't need web farm hosting. Rackspace is also high end hosting in my opinion.

Performance is going to be better on a stand alone single server and in fact in some cases shared hosting might give equal or better perfromance than Azure. No matter how you slice it database access is happening over the internet as is access to distributed cache and that is going to be slower.

In terms of reliability, that is yet to be proven for cloud hosting. From what I've seen cloud hosting can go down, it happend at Amazon not long ago a number of high profile sites had significant down time, google apps, gmail etc also goes down sometimes. There might not be a big high profile outage for Azure yet but in my testing I've seen several instances where a service (AppFabric Cache, SqlAzure) is temporarily unavailable.

Of course no-one wants their site to have any down time but lots of people get by with economy hosting and don't have much down time. I'm not yet convinced that cloud hosting in general or Azure in specific are really that much more reliable, but they should be for the cost involved. For big mega traffic sites or sites that actually generate significant revenue that cost is definitely justified but the vast majority of sites on the net do not get that kind of traffic and do not need web farm hosting. For a marketing or brochure site a little down time now and then is not a big enough problem to justify the costs in most cases.

Still, for those who want to use Azure, we're doing what we can to support it and hope you can provide feedback to help us improve that support.

Best,

Joe