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Open Source goes multi-instance on Windows Azure

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You may know there is a collection of Open Source Software packages ready and waiting to be installed in to Windows Azure. A project which built “accelerators” for popular CMS systems such as Umbraco, Drupal, Wordpress etc has been live and kicking for some time.

The Umbraco CMS has just gone through a major change. It was previously limited to single-instance usage. There are plenty of sites using it in this way, only the challenge lives with the 99.95% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA). A single instance Azure application cannot benefit from this SLA.

But that changed on Tuesday when Umbraco announced a new accelerator which now supports mutli-instance usage. The state of the site is stored in Blob Storage at the back end and all instances connect to this and enjoy 2-way sync between the site in blob storage and compute engine instances in Windows Azure:

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It’s a very quick and easy (an “accelerated”, if you will) installation process to use the accelerator. It means within a very short time you can have an available, scalable deployment of an Open Source Content Management System. This should give many the chance of quickly reacting to a business need for a CMS based application. Of course, because it’s Open Source it means you can play, modify, tweak and change the application to do what you need.

By default the application is configured to use 2 extra-small instances, but it’s obviously a simple matter to re-configure that in the service model.

To find out more, look on codeplex to get the details. Documentation is in the download package.

Planky – GBR-257

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2011
    Planky. Is it 99.95 or 99.5? Regards Gio