Using deployment slots in Azure App Services is a best practice to deploy Sitecore your application with zero downtime. However, there are some drawbacks, for example when slot specific settings are being used. This blogpost describes how to come around these issues.
Although this blog focuses primarily on Sitecore, this blogpost is applicable for any application which is hosted on an Windows Azure App Service.
The file system,which is used by Azure App Services, always points to D:\home, but it is in fact a link to a (slow) performing share. Sitecore can greatly benefit from enabling a local cache, this blogpost describes how to enable this cache.
A common problem on Azure web apps when scaling up or swapping slots is “stuttering”. At the moment an instance is added to the pool (scale out) or your swap is swapped (reload the app on the slot), your application is “cold , which means that your application on that instance needs to be reloaded. In the case of Sitecore (or other large applications), this may take a while. In this period, visitors may face a long loading time, which may take up to a few minutes.
Note: Although this blogpost series is focused towards deploying Sitecore with the speed of light, all the information in this blogpost regular web applications and app service deployments
Deploying multiple web deployment packages to multiple app services may take some time. Where parallel jobs in the Build are possible, this is not possbile (yet) in Azure. ARM templates could be used (but I am not 100% sure), but we chose to use app service deployments, as it gives us much more flexibility.
On October 9th I presented for the 3rd time at the Sitecore Symposium. In my previous blogpost I described shared how I felt during the creation of this presentation and on the day itself. In this series of blogposts I’ll describe every subject I discussed during my presentation, which will, in the end, enable you to setup your own fully automatic deployment pipeline using standard Microsoft technologie such as msbuild, msdeploy, nuget and Azure DevOps. This blogpost is just a container for all the upcoming blogposts (which is subject to change). When you are missing a subject, feel free to get in touch with me.
On October 9th I presented for the 3rd time at the Sitecore Symposium. After a security session, our session with Robbie the Robot, I chose to give some insights into our delivery pipeline for Sitecore on Azure. In this session, I will share my road to this presentation.