Hey all,

Are there any plan on supporting officially DNN as a Web worker role on Azure? I know some people have been able to deploy it on azure with some significant efforts, but will it be officially supported?

Thansk for any information you could provide.

As many people who have tried to get DotNetNuke running on Azure can tell you, it is no easy task.  I have been working with the Microsoft Azure team to identify issues which prevent DotNetNuke from running and seeing if there are ways to address them.  We have made some progress but there is still a lot of work left to complete.

One of the main issues that keeps cropping up is that Azure is a very locked down environment.  Nowhere is this more true than in the file system.  Azure web applications are not allowed to write to the application directories.  As you can imagine this is a big stumbling block for DotNetNuke.  Without this capability, you can't install DotNetNuke. Upgrade DotNetNuke or install any modules or skins.  There are even some application settings that you can't change because that would alter the web.config file - which is not allowed.

Once we have a working configuration that doesn't cripple DotNetNuke we will be sure to let everyone know.

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Joe Brinkman
DNN Corp.

Jason,
  I only wish it were that easy.  I have spent considerable time over the past couple of months working to get DotNetNuke working on Azure.  I have a working solution which I'll be blogging about over the next couple of weeks.  While DotNetNuke is hostable in Azure, it is not exactly straight forward and requires a certain level of technical skill since there is a bit of configuration required to get things up and running - at least until we can streamline the process.

As for using a VM, that doesn't really solve your problem.  Azure treats every VM - whether it is the Web Role, the Worker Role or even your own VM as a read-only device.  While it is possible for you to attach a custom VHD for the VM role, any file or configuration changes made to the VM during operation are not guaranteed to be persisted.  If the Azure Fabric controller determines that the VM must be recycled, it will start with a clean version of the VHD that was originally uploaded to the service, thus wiping out any changes made during the operation of the site.  As you can imagine, this could be catastrophic for DNN since it would likely result in a mismatch between the database and the files on disk.  Your database may think that a module had been installed or that user files were uploaded to the site, but those files would not be in the new VM since they would not have been included in the original VHD snapshot.

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Joe Brinkman
DNN Corp.