Question

I am currently experimenting with installing Orchard on Azure using the recently released “Web Sites” functionality.

I have successfully installed and setup Orchard using the template from the gallery and so far everything seems to be going well.

My question is: If I scale up the site to use 3 instances is there anything special I need to do to ensure that the instances all work from the same cache? So a new page appears on all instances at once.

I have a little experience with Umbraco and I had to push documents and the cache into blob storage for it to work correctly.

Is this already taken care of by the template?

Thanks for your help,

Dan

Answer 1

There is a guide on the Orchard website that explains how to deploy to a Windows Azure Web Role (Cloud Service). I haven’t seen an implementation for Windows Azure Web Sites that supports more than one reserved instance.

In order to make Orchard work on multiple reserved instances you’ll need to configure it to use the AzureBlobStorageProvider, which will make sure files are persisted to blob storage instead of local filesystem. This is how you would configure the Sites.config:

  <component instance-scope="per-lifetime-scope"
             type="Orchard.Azure.FileSystems.Media.AzureBlobStorageProvider, Orchard.Azure"
             service="Orchard.FileSystems.Media.IStorageProvider">
  </component>

In your Global.asax.cs you’ll also want to make sure the storage account information is read from the web.config:

        CloudStorageAccount.SetConfigurationSettingPublisher(    
            (configName, configSetter) =>    
                configSetter(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[configName])    
            );