robdmoore
commented
11 years ago Hi Mikael,
Thanks for the questions.
Completely agree that Web Sites or Web Roles are a much better option than Virtual Machines (unless you have legacy applications that can't be easily ported and aren't compatible, or you want extra control and have the IT support staff that can keep the farm up to date and you are happy to forgo some of the advantages that you get with Web Roles / Web Sites). Obviously, out of the box Web Roles have a (relatively) abysmal deployment experience, but that's what this project is concentrating on solving (so you've come to the right place :P).
Coincidental timing for this conversation actually, given I'm currently preparing a Web Sites vs Web Roles vs Virtual Machines talk for the local Cloud User Group next week. If you are keen to see the slides for it (they aren't done yet, but should be finished on Wednesday since that's when the talk is :P) then I'm developing them on GitHub: https://github.com/robdmoore/AzureWebAppsPresentation
Now, as per your questions:
- MsDeploy is a beautiful technology because it can sync pretty much anything out of the box (and you can create custom providers for it too). The Visual Studio integration is basically a layer on top of the MsDeploy MSBuild scripts, which is a layer on top of msdeploy.exe - so, you don't have to use VS and you don't have to use MSBuild.
- MsDeploy can create a package and sync that package to an IIS site (the Web Deploy component of msdeploy), but it has more than just that
- You can create an msdeploy package from any folder (e.g. folder with HTML5 app or PHP site) and in fact if you don't want to use web deploy you can use msdeploy to deploy the package (or even just a folder on the source side) to an arbitrary folder on the destination server (you just need a user with the relevant access rights) - I've used this before to sync a Windows Service to a directory on the server and then run a post sync command to restart the service (yes - it contains pre and post sync commands as well :)).
- This blog post gives a good description of how to sync folder paths: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2012/08/22/web-deploy-msdeploy-how-to-sync-a-folder.aspx
- If you want to get a better feel for the capabilities of msdeploy I can highly recommend @richardszalay's blog: http://blog.richardszalay.com/
- Here is some good practical advice from my fellow AzureWebFarm contributor @MattDavies: http://blog.mdavies.net/2012/08/12/microsofts-hidden-gem-msdeploy/
- At this stage there are no plans to add other publishing mechanisms - that would probably be a post v1.0 thing - I'm kind of interested to see how hard it would be to set up Kudu to get Git deployment working and seeing if I think it's worth getting it working with OctopusDeploy as well. For now though, msdeploy is more than capable enough of fitting most deployment needs.
- Re: "Azure Storage Deployment", technically you can actually do that right now with AzureWebFarm since it works by putting the msdeploy package in blob storage and when a server detects an msdeploy has been done it sends the package to blob storage for the other farm nodes to pick up and deploy
@MattDavies and I are currently using AzureWebFarm in a number of production environments successfully and it's working well. The main "problem" we have (that will allow us to make it 1.0 when fixed) is how long it can take to sync a deployed site between all nodes (it can take between 30 and 60 seconds). This is largely due to the architecture that we inherited from Accelerator for Web Roles (the initial codebase we started from - written by some Microsoft guys). We have been thinking about the different options on and off over the last few months and one of the ones we are considering is DFSR - if we do end up going with that can we hit you up for some advice and code reviews given you have experience with it?
mikoskinen
Our company is currently running our own web farm on Azure, which we have built using IIS and DFSR. It's working OK, but we're not IT experts so we would prefer Cloud Services or Web Sites. We can't use Azure Web Sites as they can't be connected to a Virtual Network so we're now wondering if the Cloud Services with the help of Azure Web Farm project would suite our needs.
We have some sites which aren't Visual Studio projects. For example some of them are just static HTML+JS+CSS sites, some are PHP projects. Currently we're deploying these using FTP. Azure Web Farm uses MsDeploy and the big question is, could we use that to deploy these sites which live outside the Visual Studio? Can we point MsDeploy to a directory and tell it to publish it?
I wonder if there's plans to add more publishing mechanism in addition to MsDeploy, like FTP or Git? Or maybe something like "Azure Storage Deployment", where a site could be zipped and uploaded to some container in blob storage and the Azure Web Farm would automatically poll that container and update the site if the zip is updated.