November Happy Hour will be moved to Thursday December 5th.
November Happy Hour will be moved to Thursday December 5th.
This topic describes how to set up an Optimizely CMS site to run on Azure Web Apps. The example creates an Alloy sample site using the Episerver Visual Studio extension, but you can apply most steps to sites created in other ways.
Note: See also the Installing the Optimizely Alloy sample site in the Azure cloud video for information about cloud installation.
In this topic
The following image illustrates a CMS website running in an Azure Web Apps environment with multiple instances. The website instances share the same SQL database and BLOB storage that stores binary file data in the cloud environment. The sites are load-balanced, and a Service Bus manages events between the CMS websites.
Using App Service plans, you can increase or reduce the number of CMS sites from the Azure portal.
The following steps create an Optimizely CMS website running in an Azure website environment.
Log in to the Azure portal and follow these steps to create the necessary Azure components:
When you run on Azure, you should store media (such as images) in Azure BLOB storage to enable scaling.
To scale the site to run on several instances, set up a Service Bus in Azure to handle messages among the site instances.
Next you need to change some configurations for the website to work with Azure.
There are two ways of configuring Azure resources, one way is by using the EPiServer.Azure package directly and map BLOB and event providers in the appsettings.json, and the other is by using the EPiServer.CloudPlatform.Cms NuGet package.
Choose one of these options.
Using the EPiServer.Azure package NuGet directly: Open appsettings.json and add the following configuration under the episerver.framework section to map BLOB and event providers to Azure.
{
"EPiServer": {
"Cms": {
"BlobProviders": {
"DefaultProvider": "azure",
"Providers": {
"azure": "EPiServer.Azure.Blobs.AzureBlobProvider, EPiServer.Azure"
}
},
"AzureBlobProvider": {
"ConnectionString": "The contention string",
"ContainerName": "The container name"
},
"EventProvider": {
"Provider": "EPiServer.Azure.Events.AzureEventProvider,EPiServer.Azure"
},
"AzureEventProvider": {
"ConnectionString": "The contention string",
"TopicName": "The topic name "
}
}
}
}
public class Startup
{
private readonly IConfiguration _configuration { get;}
public Startup(IWebHostEnvironment webHostingEnvironment, IConfiguration configuration)
{
. . .
_configuration = configuration;
}
public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
. . .
services.AddCmsCloudPlatformSupport(_configuration);
}
}
This way, the Azure BLOB, event provider, and other Azure cloud-specific components are added. Default options like containername and topicname ("mysitemedia", "MySiteEvents", "EPiServerAzureBlobs", and "EPiServerAzureEvents") are picked up from the connectionstrings section (see next step).connectionString="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=<name>;AccountKey=<key>"
You can find the connection string to your Azure BLOB provider in the Azure portal under your storage account > Settings > Access keys. {
"ConnectionStrings": {
"EPiServerDB": "Server=tcp:abcdefgh.database.windows.net,1433;Database=mySiteDB;User ID=dbadmin@abcdefgh;Password={password};Trusted_Connection=False;Encrypt=True;Connection Timeout=30;MultipleActiveResultSets=True",
"EPiServerAzureBlobs": "DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=mystorageccount;AccountKey=abcdefghijklmnoabcdefghijklmnoabcdefghijklmno",
"EPiServerAzureEvents": "Endpoint=sb://myservicebus.servicebus.windows.net/;SharedAccessKeyName=RootManageSharedAccessKey;SharedAccessKey=abcdefghijklmnoabcdefghijklmnoabcdefghijklmno="
}
}
The application or site needs to be pushed to a container registry, Azure provider, or such resource. There are many ways to to push applications to the container registry in Azure; one way is by using Visual Studio, see Microsoft: Container Tools in Visual Studio.
From version 7.7 of CMS, there is a Bootstrap feature for content. It works so that if there is an export package located at [SolutionDir]\App_Data\DefaultSiteContent.episerverdata, that package is imported during initialization and a site is created. The Bootstrap happens only if the site does not have any previous content. For cloud deployment, you may want to first publish the project to the cloud environment before starting a local site configured against the cloud database. In that case, the Bootstrap happens in the cloud environment, which is much faster (because the site and database are likely in same datacenter) and also sets the SiteUrl to the cloud URL for the created site.
You can also transfer data to an Optimizely site running on Azure Web Apps using the Optimizely CMS export/import functionality. Export the start page from your local site and database and import on the site running in Azure before continuing to the next step. See Exporting and importing in the Optimizely User Guide.
To log in to the site on Azure, create a user with access to the edit/admin view, start the local site while connected to SQL Database, and perform the following steps. You must allow the source IP address to access the Azure database server. You can enable this in the Azure Portal on the specific SQL Database server (select the SQL server > Firewall/Virtual Networks > Add client IP). How to create the first user depends on which identity provider has been configured; membership or AspNet Identity provider.
Go to the CMS admin view and activate your cloud license on both test and production environments. The running instances will be counted towards the total number of instances allowed by the license. See also: Managing cloud licenses. OBS: Should be new picture. It is not finished yet.
Depending on how the site was created (see Deploying content), you might need to update the site definition for the CMS website created in the first steps after deployment. If so, log in to the website and go to the CMS admin view > Config > Manage Websites, and change the Site URL to the URL in Azure. This will also map a host name to the correct site in CMS. The URL can be found in the Azure portal. Select your web app > Overview, the site URL is given in the right column.
Optimizely CMS supports writing to the diagnostics log using BLOB storage.
Follow these steps to activate the logging:
Note: The web app will restart when activating the logging. Note that Id do not know if it is valid for new Azure app service.
The Azure SQL Database Automatic tuning is a feature that provides improved performance and automatic tuning of the database, based on AI and machine learning. It is recommended to leave the settings as default, and in particular leave CREATE INDEX as Off, as turning it on might cause problems with the Optimizely Dynamic Data Store (DDS) and sub-optimal indexes.
You should use a scalable search solution when you host in Azure. It is not recommended to use the Optimizely Search package in Azure Web Apps, as data corruption can occur in the Lucene index used by the built-in search, when scaling up to multiple instances.
If you need scaling, use Optimizely Search & Navigation instead. This is a hosted service that you connect to, and that works the same way as when your site runs on-premise. Optimizely Search & Navigation is included when running your solution in Optimizely Digital Experience Platform (DXP).
Azure Web Apps supports deployment slots, so you can deploy new code into a staging environment before moving it to production. To make sure deployment slots do not interfere with the production environment, make sure you define the EPiServerDB, EPiServerAzureEvents and EPiServerAzureBlobs connection strings in the Azure portal as "sticky" (session affinity) to each slot. If a deployment slot re-uses the production connection strings, it is treated as a load-balanced server, part of the production environment, including licensing restrictions. See Microsoft documentation for details about using staging with Azure Web Apps.
Note: Defining the EPiServerDB, EPiServerAzureEvents and EPiServerAzureBlobs as connection strings in the Azure Portal requires at least EPiServer.CMS.Core 8.3.0.
The core parts of Optimizely CMS do not use Session State but some functionality does, such as some Visitor Groups criteria. There are two approaches to enabling session state, depending on the sticky session feature (also known as session affinity) provided by Azure App Service which makes sure a user is reaching the same server combined with the default in-memory session state provider.
Another approach to enable better scaling is using an optimized provider for Azure, such as the session provider for Azure Web Apps.
Last updated: Jul 02, 2021