Showing posts with label CMS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CMS. Show all posts

Sunday 1 July 2012

Azure Web Sites

Overview:  I love Azure.  There is just so much we can now do and a new feature released in June 1012.  The "web sites" function in Windows Azure (WA) are extremely flexible and this post shows how you can create a website using various templates in my case a Joomla CMS web site complete with a My SQL database.

There are a lot of options for using Azure web sites such as creating your own web sites in Visual Studio and uploading them to the Web Site role (all for free).  In this post I'm looking at leveraging a CMS to create a web site.  Windows Azure offers up to 10 free web site roles.  There are a lot of templates in the gallery so I feel this is a great place for design agencies and small business that need commercial web sites such as CMS, blogs ect.  They even have the WordPress template.

Steps to get Joomla working:
You will need a Windows Azure (WA) account, you get a free 90 day trial and if you hook your MSDN to it you get a decent amount of extra cloud computing hours thrown in. But for the 10 free "web sites" you don't use your cloud hours - it's free!

Once you are logged into the portal click the Add (+ button on the bottom left of the screen to add new services.  In this case select "Web Site" > "From Gallery" as show below.
Select the "CMS" tab and in my case I chose the "Joomla" template.
 Add the site name and login credentials as prompted (you can add a CName record later).
 The web site is created that backs onto my MySQL database.
Check the url and build your site.
Summary:  Web sites in Azure are easy, they are backed up by MS, there are tons of templates or build your own options, it free.  Microsoft is adding functionality and new services to Azure quickly and is easy to use.