The Benefits of Moving Umbraco CMS Website to Azure and Tips to Consider
Umbraco is one of the most popular CMS that business owners choose to create their websites. Though it is a .NET based CMS, but at times it is not very easy to handle certain situations. If you have plans to migrate your website from your server to Azure, then you should know some basic things that can make the process smooth and easy.
As you know that it is quite easy to migrate your site from a regular Windows Server hosted solution to an Azure web app while including all the benefit like auto scaling or blue-green deployments. But you may face some issues while switching to Azure. Let’s discuss more on it.
Why Migrate Umbraco Website to the Cloud?
For an Easy Life Most of the Time:
Moving the code and the content is smooth if you follow some tips or consider hiring an experienced Umbraco development company. Moving the content is great most of the time, though some of the workarounds may be a bit crafty like migrating the user data file so that there is no merge conflict.
Auto Update and Upgrades:
Umbraco CMS development is a managed service and from time to time it comes up with upgrades which brings new and latest features, security patches and plugins and extensions. The auto updates are a neat trick and this happens without any client intervention.
Managed Service:
Migrating to the cloud will help you to avail a managed service so that you don’t need to know how the server is patched or be an expert in the cloud to understand file structures and scaling. It is an excellent engine that helps save tons of time and resources more than 90% and for sites without expert developers, moving to the cloud should be the best option.
The Umbraco Website Migration to Azure Steps:
There are only three basic steps to migrate your site while keeping all the content intact:
- Migrate the SQL database to one that is hosted in the Azure
- Copy your Umbraco media folder that includes all your uploaded files to an azure Blob Storage
- Update your Umbraco repository and then configure it to deploy to the Azure.
SQL Migration:
Microsoft has made it very easy to move your On Premises SQL data base to the Azure and for that you can also use simple tools like the data migration assistant, which can handle things automatically. All you need is to follow the tutorial and if you get some warnings while migrating that it no longer supports Xml data types, then you can ignore them. Do make sure that your target database name does not contain a dot in the name as this will create an error and make it unable to connect to the Azure SQL instance.
Media Migration:
All your Umbraco files that are uploaded are saved by default in the media folder, which is relative to the root of the website. In Azure this is a big no. The recommended approach is to use the Azure Blog Storage service as it is just a storage as a service, which is driven by a REST API. This means that you have to configure a storage account in Azure and then install the Umbraco extension for Azure storage as a NuGet package.
So to sum it up, to move to the Cloud, you should make sure your core version is at the newest version as each package that is used on the site is on their latest respect version which is supported by cloud.